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Cloud Computing: Enterprises Begin to Weight Sustainability Criterion Higher
All the major tech titans describe their cloud computing offerings as sustainable, for example: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Can we really believe that the mammoth data centers from these giants are energy-efficient sustainable operations?
If you compare the carbon footprint of many on-premise data centers to that of consolidated public-cloud data centers that host those same data and applications, the cloud is by far greener. They can do that by pooling the resources needed by many into a centralized cloud provider. This allows hardware utilization to be optimized and efficiencies of volume to be applied. It’s a greener path. It’s both energy and resource-efficient.
While true sustainability will be a goal hard to reach, most of the major cloud vendors have a plan to further reduce carbon emissions and are reporting some success. Most vendors now offer tools to report on carbon savings and to track and monitor the usage of their cloud resources.
Will it matter? 90 percent of IT managers say that sustainability is an important consideration when selecting a cloud vendor. But Miguel Borrega, analyst at Gartner, doesn’t buy it.
Borrega said that “enterprises are migrating to the cloud for many good reasons: access to innovation, geographical location, agility and flexibility to provision computing resources, or cost savings just to name a few. The reality is that as of today, only a few enterprises are doing so for sustainability reasons.”
But Borrega adds that “a small but growing set of enterprises with ambitious or science-based GHG emission reduction targets that are starting to give more weight to the sustainability criteria in their strategic and service provider choices.”
