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Cloud Computing: Vulnerable to Climate Change
Cloud computing is often hailed for helping to offload less-efficient on-premise computing tasks. An IDC report estimated that as much as a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions could be eliminated by relocating computing workloads to more energy-efficient cloud-computing data centers, primarily to those that use solar and wind renewable power.
But while shifting to the cloud may make some incremental impact in reducing the elements that have provoked climate change, the other side of the coin is that climate change also poses a risk to cloud computing. Lack of clean water, power outages and brownouts, floods and storms — all of these things can threaten the uptime and availability of the cloud.
A survey of data centers by Upside Institute found that:
- 90 percent do not have a disaster response plan for flooding
- 71 percent have made no preparations to address severe weather
- 45 percent say that climate change is not an issue for them
Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Uptime Institute, said that “datacenters will continue to be at the center of climate change discussions not only because of the threats extreme weather poses to mission-critical facilities but also because datacenters depend a great deal on utilities such as power, water, and telecoms.”
Chloé Messdaghi, a cybersecurity advisor, said that “I’ve met with various executives in cybersecurity who have yet to discuss the potential impact of climate change on their business. When climate change is mentioned, it’s usually dismissed. Dismissed due to deniers of the existence of climate change or simply because they haven’t found the time to understand the potential risks.”
Paul Barford, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that “there has not been enough time spent thinking and studying the long-term effects of climate change on clouds and network resiliency. The impact of climate change and the threats that it could unleash are beyond our planning horizon… The most important thing is that we need to act immediately and urgently on both climate change and improving resilience. We cannot continually operate in a reactive mode that scrambles to fix problems. We cannot wait for things to reach a state of emergency.”
