How cloud computing can reduce your carbon footprint

The green benefits and savings cloud computing will bring to your organisation

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The cloud computing paradigm is sending shock waves throughout the IT world as companies and organisations of all sizes across all vertical sectors wake up to the potential benefits of the cloud.

As this shift increasingly affects every part of the IT ecosystem, from service providers and systems architects to developers and end users, much attention is devoted to the economic benefits of the game-changing model. A great deal of attention is also devoted to the fact that transitioning services into the cloud can offer vast improvements in efficiency, agility and innovation. And these efficiency savings include very compelling environmental benefits.

Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, pointed out that - in these days of rising energy costs - the cloud model can offer substantial green advantages. "As it turns out, the cloud has many green properties. By aggregating data in datacentres that are well run for efficiency, you're able to drive the cost down of energy and actually get huge green benefits. So there are a lot of reasons to move everybody into the cloud," said Charney.

Analyst group Quocirca advises IT and business decision makers to carefully evaluate green benefits of the cloud model as sustainability continues to gain importance as a performance indicator for organisations and their IT departments.

"The green story behind the cloud comes down to aggregation. Cloud allows applications to be run using the same underlying hardware at much higher utilisation levels. Therefore, there is less equipment, less energy to power the equipment and less energy for cooling. If a company is running its own datacentre on a basis of one application per physical server, then its hardware utilisation rate is around 10 per cent. On a storage level, hardware utilisation is only around 30 per cent," explained Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca.

However, virtualisation in on-premises private cloud infrastructures can increase hardware utilisation rates and thus boost energy efficiency. Longbottom added: "So if you can force utilisation rates up to around 50 per cent, then you will be using one fifth of the power to keep the servers running and also reduce the energy used in cooling down the server room."

How cloud computing can reduce your carbon footprint

The green benefits and savings cloud computing will bring to your organisation

Moving into the public cloud, the green benefits become even more compelling. “A specialist datacentre will be much more efficient when it comes to server utilisation rates and minimising the energy used for cooling. They will use techniques such as hot aisle/cold isle, water cooling or even free air cooling that requires no energy at all. By having a cloud partner deliver applications from super-efficient datacentres, companies can reduce their overall energy footprint by as much as 80 per cent,” said Longbottom.

“A public cloud running on a multi-tenanted basis should have higher utilisation rates than a private cloud running only for a single company," he continued. "However, a single-tenancy public cloud may only be as good as a private cloud – although I would hope that any service provider offering cloud would be able to architect a cloud to a better degree than your average private company.”

Longbottom also pointed out that cloud computing allows for intelligent provisioning: “Companies can look at what workloads are running and dynamically de-provision equipment when not in use. We need make sure everything is running optimally. Can we turn off CPUs, storage or servers? We should look to take equipment into light sleep mode to reduce energy usage and improve green credentials. The more we chip away the greener it becomes.”

Conor Callanan, CEO of Microsoft cloud accelerate partner Core, added that another key green benefit of cloud computing comes from the model’s ability to offer dynamic provisioning of computing resources.

"There are many green benefits of the cloud and clearly organisations are benefiting from shrinking down the physical size of their kit estates and putting IT into cloud. The traditional way of buying computing power is to purchase enough capacity for your highest load – say to support a Christmas peak on an ecommerce site,” Callanan said.

“But going into the Microsoft Azure cloud and buying on a pay-as-you-go basis allows you to pay for what you use. You buy one month’s processing power as it will be much cheaper than having all the kit on premise and paying for management, power and cooling – even when it is not being used.”

How cloud computing can reduce your carbon footprint

The green benefits and savings cloud computing will bring to your organisation

This view was echoed by Rod Plummer, managing director of web development specialist Shoothill: “When it comes to web-based apps it can be very difficult to predict bandwidth. There are massive peaks and troughs in usage. Now we are using Microsoft Azure cloud services, we only have to pay for what we use. We are able to throw extra CPUs at any problems when required. If we suddenly get demand spikes, we can provision more servers and not have to massively overcompensate with resources and have them lay idle for most of the time.”

To assess the environmental impact of cloud computing, Microsoft recently engaged with Accenture, a technology, consulting and outsourcing company, and WSP Environment & Energy, a global consultancy dedicated to environmental and sustainability issues, to compare the energy use and carbon footprint of Microsoft cloud offerings for businesses with corresponding Microsoft on-premise deployments.

The analysis focused on three of Microsoft’s mainstream business applications: Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Each application is available both as an on-premise version and as a cloud-based equivalent. The team compared the environmental impact of cloud-based and on-premise IT delivery on a per-user basis, and considered three different deployment sizes: small (100 users), medium (1,000 users) and large (10,000 users).

The study found that, for large deployments, Microsoft’s cloud solutions can reduce energy use and carbon emissions by more than 30 per cent when compared to their corresponding Microsoft business applications installed on-premise. The benefits were found to be even more impressive for small deployments: Energy use and emissions can be reduced by more than 90 per cent with a shared cloud service.

The report, entitled Cloud computing and sustainability: the environmental benefits of moving to the cloud, concluded: “Though large organisations can lower energy use and emissions by addressing some of these factors in their own datacentres, providers of public cloud infrastructure are best positioned to reduce the environmental impact of IT because of their scale. By moving applications to cloud services, IT decision-makers can take advantage of highly efficient cloud infrastructure, effectively “outsourcing” their IT efficiency investments while helping their company achieve its sustainability goals. Beyond the commonly cited benefits of cloud computing – such as cost savings and increased agility – cloud computing has the potential to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of many business applications.”