Enterprises are already taking advantage of cloud services to lower their capital expenditures, accelerate their deployment time, and have the ability to instantly scale without investing in additional equipment. But is the cloud ![]()
“green”?
“green”?
There has been some question on whether or not using the cloud delivers any green benefits. For example, does using a cloud service reduce an organization’s carbon footprint as opposed to using your own data center?
Well, some recent studies are showing that cloud services can help the world become greener.
Let’s look at a couple of recent studies and their key findings.
- Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a model to measure energy use and carbon footprint of cloud computing. By using the model, the Google-funded report, which was released in June, shows that moving some common software programs like email, spreadsheets, and CRM programs can save enough electricity each year to power Los Angeles for 12 months. This translates to cutting the energy use by 87%, or approximately 23 billion kilowatt hours.
- Another recent study, The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy - a Focus on Cloud Computing, which was funded by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and Microsoft, estimates that if 80% of enterprises in Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Indonesia, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the UK migrated their email, CRM and groupware applications to the cloud, they would reduce annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the equivalent of 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. This represents about 2% of IT’s contribution to GHG emissions in those countries and is equivalent to taking 1.7 million cars off the road. According to the study, it’s not only large enterprises that can make a significant contribution, but even smaller firms accounted for over 60% of savings.
Both of these studies prove that using cloud technology can create a greener planet. But it’s not just about the environment. Consider organizations with many branch offices. In this scenario, space is limited for IT equipment and anything that can help reduce rack space is beneficial. Plus, lesser equipment usually equates to lesser energy costs, lesser IT resources required at branch offices, and lesser time for set up and maintenance. So in this case, less is really more.
Using a cloud-based network management system like Aerohive’s HiveManager Online to manage and provision devices through the cloud certainly helps companies reach “green.” By moving the management platform into the cloud and out of your data center, you not only have no management appliance to install or manage, but you also have no rack space to build or house, no power consumption, and no cooling to worry about.
While it may be difficult to precisely quantify the energy savings for your company by moving to the cloud, the two detailed studies cited are important steps in showing the positive environmental impacts of moving technologies to the cloud . Moving to the cloud will not only lead to long-term energy cost savings for your organization, but it will also help us achieve a greener planet.