Why the cloud is a greener choice

For many organ­i­sa­tions, envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty has shift­ed from being a nice to have to a non-nego­tiable neces­si­ty.

There are sev­er­al rea­sons for this, not least the urgent debate over cli­mate change that dom­i­nates the world stage. In many cas­es, organ­i­sa­tions will be look­ing to com­ply with leg­is­la­tion; the UK, for exam­ple, has set a net-zero car­bon emis­sions tar­get by 2050. For oth­ers, it is a case of rep­u­ta­tion­al risk man­age­ment and pres­sures from con­sumers, share­hold­ers and employ­ees.

Also, a chang­ing demo­graph­ic – mil­len­ni­als already make up around 50 per cent of UK employ­ees, with Gen­er­a­tion Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) begin­ning to enter the work­force – sees busi­ness tech buy­ers now choos­ing brands that align with their per­son­al val­ues.

A recent sur­vey by IDC found that six out of ten Euro­pean busi­ness­es cit­ed sus­tain­abil­i­ty as a very or extreme­ly impor­tant busi­ness pri­or­i­ty for 2020. This means that the envi­ron­men­tal impact of their IT is now as impor­tant as tra­di­tion­al fac­tors such as pric­ing.

“Tech­nol­o­gy is and will be the means to achieve sus­tain­abil­i­ty key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors,” says Mar­garet Adam, asso­ciate vice pres­i­dent, IDC Europe. “Over 50 per cent of Euro­pean com­pa­nies state explic­it­ly that they are cur­rent­ly invest­ing in tech­nolo­gies to improve sus­tain­abil­i­ty per­for­mance. Our research also showed us that there is a causal rela­tion­ship between sus­tain­abil­i­ty-tar­get­ed gov­er­nance and invest­ments, and strong finan­cial per­for­mance.”

Why moving to the cloud is a green choice

One often-cit­ed way to be green­er is to move lega­cy IT infra­struc­ture and ser­vices from on-premis­es servers to the cloud. The cloud is con­sid­ered inher­ent­ly more sus­tain­able than tra­di­tion­al approach­es to con­sum­ing IT. New research points to sig­nif­i­cant effi­cien­cy improve­ments in cloud dat­a­cen­tres that have enabled com­put­ing out­put to increase while ener­gy con­sump­tion remains low.

“The adop­tion of cloud mod­els and ser­vices presents organ­i­sa­tions with an oppor­tu­ni­ty to demon­strate a rel­a­tive­ly ‘quick win’ for cut­ting down emis­sions relat­ed to their oper­a­tions,” accord­ing to techUK’s Cloud 2020 & Beyond report.

“Cloud and dat­a­cen­tres play a cru­cial role in cor­po­rate progress on envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty ini­tia­tives and cloud play­ers have made sig­nif­i­cant progress on reduc­ing PUE [pow­er-usage effi­cien­cy] in the last ten or so years,” says For­rester researcher Sal­va­tore Schi­ano.

“But as com­pa­nies con­tin­ue to rely on these ser­vices and scruti­ny on cor­po­rate cli­mate action accel­er­ates, requests for improved effi­cien­cy, resilien­cy and reduced over­all envi­ron­men­tal impact have accel­er­at­ed.”

Indeed, the major pub­lic cloud com­pa­nies have all announced ambi­tious plans to achieve net-zero car­bon emis­sions and use of renew­able ener­gy. Last year, Ama­zon and Glob­al Opti­mism co-found­ed the Cli­mate Pledge, a com­mit­ment to reach the Paris Agree­ment ten years ear­ly and be net-zero car­bon by 2040.

“Cloud com­put­ing brings economies of scale effi­cien­cy by oper­at­ing hyper­scale, mod­ern, homoge­nous, pur­pose-built com­pute facil­i­ties. These facil­i­ties are designed to be effi­cient to cool, in loca­tions that offer free air cool­ing such as North­ern Europe, con­nect­ed by plan­et scale pri­vate­ly owned data net­works. Invest­ment in these facil­i­ties runs into the hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars a year, with most of the largest facil­i­ties opened in the last ten years,” says James Breeze, prin­ci­pal and cloud lead at tech­nol­o­gy con­sul­tan­cy DMW.

“The sheer scale of these facil­i­ties across the four major glob­al hyper­scale providers means it’s worth­while for them to employ full-time teams to research and devel­op the best tech­nol­o­gy for effi­cient and sus­tain­able oper­a­tions. Even a mar­gin­al improve­ment, deployed at glob­al scale, can rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant sav­ing.”

Helping customers be more sustainable

Cloud con­sult­ing and man­aged ser­vice provider Xtravirt says it has helped nav­i­gate dozens of enter­prise-scale cus­tomers to a more sus­tain­able future with the cloud. Strate­gic ser­vices direc­tor Robin Gard­ner argues that sus­tain­abil­i­ty isn’t just about eco-cre­den­tials; it can also apply to organ­i­sa­tion­al capa­bil­i­ty.

“Xtravirt is increas­ing­ly mov­ing cus­tomers to cloud-based ser­vices so that invest­ment in skills with­in IT func­tions can be focused on the deliv­ery of busi­ness dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion rather than the main­te­nance of dat­a­cen­tre infra­struc­ture,” he says.

More­over, it is also impor­tant to note that cloud providers are extend­ing their com­mit­ment to cut­ting car­bon emis­sions to help­ing cus­tomers with their own sus­tain­abil­i­ty objec­tives.

One exam­ple of this is Octo­pus Ener­gy, which lever­ages the ben­e­fits that come with being in the cloud to pro­vide con­sumers with incen­tives to move their ener­gy usage out­side expen­sive and car­bon-inten­sive peak hours to be more sus­tain­able. Using Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, the com­pa­ny can cal­cu­late when the whole­sale cost of ener­gy and car­bon inten­si­ty is at its low­est and alert cus­tomers of the best time to plug in.

“We’re try­ing to demon­strate that actu­al­ly invest­ing in cloud-native tech­nolo­gies enables you to deliv­er excep­tion­al cus­tomer ser­vice and low­er costs to cus­tomers, and the kinds of prod­ucts and data man­age­ment which enable peo­ple to act more sus­tain­ably,” says Octo­pus Energy’s chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer James Eddi­son.

“We’ve proven in mul­ti­ple ways that price is a pow­er­ful tool to help ask cus­tomers to change behav­iour. And we’re pro­vid­ing ways to make that trans­par­ent for them, and all of this is because we have the scal­a­bil­i­ty and the ser­vices online in the cloud.”

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty has become a decid­ing fac­tor when it comes to pur­chas­ing tech­nol­o­gy. This extends to the cloud as it is increas­ing­ly viewed as a means of help­ing both organ­i­sa­tions and end-users become more sus­tain­able, hit their busi­ness objec­tives and, of course, bet­ter care for the plan­et.