How Cloud Adoption Can Reduce Carbon Emission By Janifha Evangeline

How Cloud Adoption Can Reduce Carbon Emission

Janifha Evangeline | Friday, 13 August 2021, 00:40 IST

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Indian enterprises and public sector companies, which migrated computing workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud anticipate decreasing not only the energy use but also the associated carbon footprint as well. These companies can reduce carbon footprint by nearly 80 percent stated Amazon Web Services on August 4th, 2021, when the company announced the findings from the 'Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to the Cloud for APAC' report by 451 Research.

The impact of data centers on environments

Today’s businesses realize that data centers act as key and core to their technological requirements. However, one of the greatest demerits of data centers would be their environmental impact. Every single data center has the capacity to consume more power than a medium-sized city, cited New York Times article and this was shocking information for everyone who read the article as they were not aware of the damage data centers could be doing to the environment.

Fundamentally, data centers are computers that are stacked together and keep working continuously and therefore, as a consequence gets heated. Now, this is where cooling systems come into the picture and the mechanisms to cool down the superabundant amounts of computers that use energy adds to the carbon emissions.

An article on Linkedin – the social networking website for professionals looking for new jobs or job change states that over seventeen percent of the total carbon footprint is from the data centers, while the electricity required to run these amounts to almost thirty billion watts. Furthermore, since these servers run at their full capacity - 24/7, they waste ninety percent of the energy.

Cloud computing addresses energy efficiencies

Cloud infrastructure intends to approach 2 major elements of green IT and they are energy efficiency & resource efficiency. Cloud computing is considered a greener resource owing to the following reasons:

Resource virtualization

Virtualization - the foundational technology which enables cloud solutions allows a single physical server to run multiple Operating System copies parallelly. Through this consolidation, cloud computing reduces the physical server footprint, allowing green benefits. Because of the resource efficiency, cloud technologies permit few pieces of equipment to run workloads, perceptively decreasing the need for data centers at the same time minimizing the e-waste footprint. Since not many pieces of equipment are required to be powered, less electricity will be consumed.

Pay-per-use model

The Pay-per-use or pay-as-you-go model of pricing in cloud services allows end-users to use only what is needed. When this is coupled with self-service, the life-cycle management improves since users have control over how much resources they can use, how much is needed, and switch on and off the resource once the work is done. The idea of pay as you go attracts enterprises as it is their way of reducing costs, at the same time benefiting the environment from proper utilization of the resource.

Multi-tenancy facilitates to leverage the common cloud infrastructure

What is significant about multi-tenancy is that it lets numerous companies over a public cloud or business departments within a private cloud access capabilities on a common cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, the demand patterns across companies or business departments could be combined in order to flatten out in consequence. Besides, when automation comes into the picture, these ratios between the peak and average loads can decrease, reducing the requirements for extra infrastructure & resources.

Green energy  

While several cloud computing service and solution providers have replaced fuel with green energy intending to power up their servers, most of the hosting providers have now begun to leverage hydro, wind, and solar energy as a component in their energy requirements. In the United Kingdom and few other parts of Europe, cloud hosting companies are already leveraging green energy solutions.

Indian organizations can reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent

The Indian data center market is anticipated to reach 580,000 m2 by 2024, as per the report by 451 Research. It is expected to register a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 16 percent over the forecast period and this was found to be the highest among APAC markets surveyed. Since the data center activities increase, there will be an increase in energy consumption. And, this will make energy efficiency a central point for data center providers or public sector users.

“In our study, the server-level efficiencies of Indian organizations exceeded their peers in other surveyed APAC countries as a result of higher rates of virtualization and a more aggressive stance towards workload consolidation. Indian organizations drive their systems somewhat harder, and their server infrastructure is among the youngest on average in APAC. However, much of this is offset by inefficiencies at the facility level," Kelly Morgan, Research Director, Datacenter Infrastructure & Services at 451 Research of S&P Global Market Intelligence said.

“Cloud technology can credibly help companies in India decarbonize,” said Puneet Chandok, President Commercial Business – AWS India and South Asia, AISPL. “With India’s vibrant startup ecosystem already pioneering low carbon solutions, it is imperative that enterprises, public sector organizations, and policy-makers factor in sustainability as a critical part of their cloud migration decisions.”

Conclusion

Thus, either migrating workloads to cloud resources or developing new workloads in a cloud-native environment can be an enterprise’s way of going green in order to achieve sustainability, and the cloud is considered more energy efficient and carbon-efficient than running data centers. Unquestionably, the cloud emerges as a clear driver of green initiatives in the tech space in every regard such as cost, energy, and resources. Therefore, as more and more organizations/customers start demanding energy efficiency, this could be one way of going green.

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