Cloud is the Future of Sustainable Technology
Sustainable technology is sufficiently available that few businesses can overlook it when adopting sustainability best practices. Indeed, apart from the moral obligation, it makes business sense if it reduces operational costs, and is a PR win amongst consumers, business partners and stakeholders. It’s a fact that many consumers are rejecting some companies because of sustainability-related concerns. Similarly, organisations buying products and services from suppliers, are likely to assess the sustainability position of that supplier.
However, it’s a fact that many organisations don’t have the financial resources available to implement extensive sustainability initiatives within their own data centres and technology operations.
For many businesses cloud migration or increasing cloud elements in a hybrid environment is the fastest way to achieve carbon-neutral IT operations; using less power and helping reduce carbon emissions.
Public Cloud Providers’ data centres utilise economies of scale to reduce power consumption, optimise cooling, reduce water consumption, deploy power-efficient enterprise servers, and maximise server utilisation.
Public cloud providers are leading the way in adopting technology and practises to being fully carbon neutral. Migrating your tech to a public Cloud provider like Google who are actively neutralising their carbon footprint, can be a relatively easy way to improve your own Green credentials’.
Google are decarbonizing energy consumption so that by 2030, they’ll operate on carbon-free energy, everywhere, 24/7.
Google has pledged to replenish 120% of the water it consumes by 2030 and are actively supporting water security and ecosystems everywhere it operates.
Google has developed the Freshwater Ecosystems Explorer, in partnership with UNEP and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre that quantifies and visualises surface water changes over the past decades and provides a free, easy-to-use geospatial platform to help decision-makers access data on freshwater systems.
Amazon Web S incorporates sustainability considerations into its data centre by design and has a long-term commitment reach 100% renewable energy usage by 2025. When companies move to the AWS Cloud from on-premises infrastructure, they typically reduce carbon emissions by 88% because AWS data centres offer environmental economies of scale. Organisations use up to 77% fewer servers, 84% less power, and use a 28% cleaner mix of solar and wind power in the AWS Cloud than in their own unecological on-premises or hosted data centres.
In 2019 Amazon and 216 other signatories co-founded The Climate Pledge to increase sustainability and reduce carbon emissions, committing to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, that’s 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement
AWS customers report that running their applications AWS cloud can help them to lower their carbon footprint by as much as 88% when compared to the own enterprise data centres.
AWS customers whose organisations are committing to decarbonisation and sustainability efforts can take advantage of the new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool; the tool is free and available to all AWS customers. AWS customers can access the tool via Cost & Usage Reports in their AWS billing console. Customers can view carbon emission statistics on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, by geography and by AWS service
Microsoft Azure is also focussing a huge commitment on four key areas of environmental impact to local communities –
- Carbon – 100% Renewable energy by 2025
- Water -positive by 2030 (replenish more water than is consumed)
- Zero-waste certification by 2030
- Ecosystems – Net Zero – deforestation from new construction
There are more than 8 million data centres worldwide which means the IT sector has the fastest-growing global energy footprint. However, in their report “The Green Behind the Cloud” Accenture have stated that migrations to the Cloud could reduce global carbon emissions by as much as 59 million tons of CO2 annually.
