Enterprises Can Aim to Become Sustainable by Reaching for the ‘Cloud’

Sustainability is no longer restrained to some criteria in some verticals. Sustainability now has a wider and customized approach for all verticals, including technology such as the cloud. The whole idea of the move towards adopting a sustainable cloud is achieving a net-zero carbon impact by reducing carbon emissions and creating responsible innovations. With the increase in data storage and security on-premises to drive financial,security and agile benefits for organizations, we are not looking at the environmental damage it is making. The effects of climate change will cost companies up to $1.6 trillion per year by 2025, as per a report by Forbes. By moving to the cloud, companies cannot just gain flexibility and scalability,while simultaneously cutting costs. They also save workplaces and the environment. Migrating to a public cloud can save 30% - 40% total cost of ownership (TCO). With the cloud, not only are fewer servers used but they are powered efficiently reducing the carbon impact on a company’s data center. Cloud providers are not just looking at the security and accessibility of the data but also creating cloud platforms that are sustainable and help reduce the negative impact on the environment.

This brings us to a major question, what needs to be the thought process when choosing the cloud to drive sustainability?

- Choose a cloud provider whose offering has a plan on reducing the carbon footprint. The details on the usage of power, operations and retirement of a data center should be very clear
- They should not suggest major redesign but use Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
- They should use the appropriate programming language for the task which can help in reducing the application’s energy consumption
- Choose a cloud provider who has a direction on innovating further on the sustainable cloud concept

Sustainability is not a cloud innovation driver anymore. Sustainability has become and will continue to be the greater factor influencing the ROI of cloud projects. Organizations should look into cloud providers who are actually addressing the environmental issue through their constant innovations. By moving IT operations to the public cloud, organizations can move towards attaining reduced carbon emissions and electricity consumption.

Organizations should also understand the benefits they get to receive when choosing this sustainable path:
Organizations can have a better infrastructure supporting their IT operations by moving to a public cloud
By using the cloud organizations can achieve a better utilization rate as compared to having the data center on-premise with the ‘Pay for only what you use’ formula.

Cloud hardware has a faster refresh speed as its overall utilization is higher
Reduced consumption of electricity

Reduction in climate impact