Driving Sustainability Through the Cloud

Given the very pertinent concerns around climate change and resource scarcity, #sustainability is understandably a significant priority for organizations, governments and consumers across the globe. The world is collectively moving towards a new paradigm – one where environmental & social responsibility goes hand-in-hand with business performance and economic growth.

The cloud has emerged as a key technology that can contribute to this goal of sustainability. In an increasingly digitalized and data-driven world, #datacenters are core to business success. However, data centers also consume a tremendous amount of energy, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimating that they account for around 1% of electricity consumption globally. Migrating data to the cloud optimizes this energy consumption and contributes to greener and more cost-effective data centers.

How the Cloud Contributes to Sustainability

Quite simply, #cloudmigration reduces a data center’s on-premises carbon footprint associated with hardware, cooling, computing power and other elements. Trading company-specific on-prem servers for the consolidated footprint of public clouds facilitates more efficient storage of vast quantities of data – leading to significant reductions in energy consumption (and costs) as well as other IT expenditure.

The #cloud also ensures greater operational efficiency of IT resources, by monitoring and predicting demand and dynamically adjusting server capacity accordingly. This further contributes to optimized energy consumption. Moreover, public cloud service providers and hyperscalers are increasingly working towards optimizing their infrastructure to reduce hardware electricity requirements. They are also shifting towards the use of renewable and carbon-free energy sources.

In 2021, the International Data Corp estimated that cloud adoption had the potential to prevent over 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions between that year and 2024 – a strong indicator of the cloud’s ability to drive sustainability.

Is the Cloud Green?

While the cloud is undoubtedly a powerful tool in the quest for a more sustainable economy, questions have been raised about its own sustainability. After all, the sheer rate of cloud adoption expected over the next decade would logically translate to an exponential increase in global energy consumption by cloud service providers. With sustainability at the top of mind of business leaders and consumers alike, this is not an insignificant concern.

However, measures are already being taken towards building a more sustainable cloud – spearheaded by the leading hyperscalers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. Transitioning to 100% clean and renewable energy, reusing water, and enhancing energy efficiency of data centers are broadly some of the steps being taken in this direction. Leveraging energy-efficient cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and containers will also significantly contribute towards the increased sustainability of cloud operations.

Towards a Sustainable Digital Future

As with any other technology, the cloud is not, at present, 100% eco-friendly and sustainable. But that is likely to change over the next several years as concerted efforts are made by cloud service providers and hyperscalers in the direction of energy-efficiency and carbon-neutrality. Gartner has predicted that by 2025, carbon emissions by hyperscalers will be a key criterion for organisations while making cloud purchase decisions. Therefore, the industry certainly has a powerful incentive to move towards greater sustainability.

Organisations can play their part in ensuring that their data operations are sustainable by assessing their existing IT resources, both on-premises and in the cloud, and understanding their energy consumption. This will enable them to make more informed decisions to optimize power usage, reduce emissions and waste, and cut down costs. Effective data analytics can help identify critical data and workloads that need to remain on-premises, while other data can be safely migrated to the cloud and stored in a more energy-efficient and sustainable manner.

The future is digital, and the future also needs to be sustainable. The cloud will enable us to effectively achieve both these intertwined objectives.