Global Warming has managed to attract a lot of international news headlines, and unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons. The further worsening of climate change parameters has a direct or indirect adverse impact on almost all industries. This is where the concept of environmental sustainability comes in.
Sustainability is a multi-disciplinary affair, and is derived from a lot of other fields including Economics, Science, International Relations, Politics, and last but certainly not the least, Information Technology.
Things look a lot better for the IT sector, as it has managed to reduce the utilization of toxic materials and adopted best practices to be environment friendly. A meteoric growth in the adoption of Cloud Computing is perhaps the most important, but lesser recognized step that companies took towards decarbonization.
Cloud Adoption and Sustainable Business Goals
When businesses act ethically, and have a neutral or potentially positive impact on climate change, the society, and the entire community, they are considered to be sustainable.
Sustainability has been a part of numerous enterprise’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) objectives, for quite some time now. The following mentioned goals are usually created by businesses, interested in de-carbonization and sustainability.
- Formulation of a roadmap to follow strict ESG reporting requirements.
- Development of an action plan to effectively tackle energy cost pressures, often triggered by the turmoil in international political environments. They adversely impact the overall electric costs for businesses.
- Calculation of the additional cost that investors and customers are willing to pay, as part of their sustainability related endeavors.
- Figuring out ways to reduce their carbon emissions as a business.
Business’s operations and core IT services, should be de-carbonized to successfully achieve their ESG related metrics or goals. Realistically speaking, business operations are a lot more complex in nature, which makes it extremely challenging to reduce the volume of their carbon emissions.
With core IT services, it is relatively easier to progressively build a momentum required to make an organization-wide shift regarding the reduction of carbon emissions. They can do this by adopting Cloud Computing solutions.
The most common factors behind a fast-paced adoption of Cloud-based services and solutions are that these are convenient, secure, scalable, agile and to top it all off, they even help reduce enterprises’ carbon footprint. This ultimately unleashes high value for their customers, coupled with long term environmental sustainability of our coming generations.
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Can Cloud Adoption Reduce Carbon Emissions?
The short answer to this question is yes. Having achieved a higher virtualization ratio, Cloud-based data centers are more likely to save a lot of non-renewable energy. The following points can help us understand how Cloud-based adoption can reduce carbon emissions.
- Cloud Providers use relatively latest equipment, and mostly utilize easily renewable energy, as compared to on-premise setups. Their superior quality hardware resources do not require extra electric power for cooling their large-scale data centers.
- A lot of Cloud Providers use Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) that help them fund their renewable energy supply, from across the globe.
- Cloud Providers use a single data center to serve the processing needs and storage capacities of multiple enterprises. By achieving these economies of scale, they can help move towards a “greener environment”.
- After migrating applications to the Cloud, enterprises can use certain tools and techniques to optimize the various in-efficiencies in their legacy systems.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2020, the worldwide electricity consumed by datacenters was around 1% of the total global electricity demand.
IEA also reported that the rapid surge in video conferences, video games, video streaming and social networking, caused the worldwide internet traffic to increase by 40%. It was also reported that in the last decade, the global internet users have expanded by the factor of 15.
With the aforementioned statistics in mind, it is important to evaluate how datacenters will continue to have access to cost-effective and sustainable energy resources? Or, how the future demand of metaverse and crypto currencies can effectively be handled?
The answers are yet to be found, but Cloud-based adoptions do put enterprises on the path that can eventually have a positive impact on the otherwise deteriorating global warming situation.
Tips that Help Enterprises Reduce their Carbon Emissions
The following points can help your organizations determine how Cloud-based adoptions not only slash your carbon emissions, but also boost your enterprise productivity.
- You need to have an informed assessment about your current carbon footprint, and how Cloud migration can help you reduce the potential emissions in the future. Most enterprises go forward with their Cloud migration, after calculating their associated sustainability benefits across their IT infrastructures.
- Along with sustainability goals, enterprises should also evaluate other benefits that come with the adoption of Cloud migrations and digital transformation. This will motivate them to make a full transition towards Cloud Computing solutions, in the long run.
- Make sure that all your key stakeholders are well informed about the advantages and low costs of adopting Cloud-based services and solutions. Straight-forwardness and transparency are always better, both in the short as well as long term. The benefits of adopting eco-friendly practices far outweigh the costs. This way, the stakeholders in general, and investors in particular, can easily get on-board, and won’t min absorbing the additional cost as well.
- You should also encourage your supply chain to follow a similar path towards Cloud adoption, as it ultimately broadens your contribution as a socially responsible business.
Conclusion
Each one of us owes it to our planet to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Enterprises can build an attractive brand for themselves with the adoption of Cloud Computing solutions. It not only helps your organization become carbon-neutral, but also improves overall productivity, and considerably reduces the costs.
The adoption of Cloud Computing is just one small step, and businesses can do a lot better on other fronts to be eco-friendlier. However, even smaller steps taken in the right direction can eventually move us closer towards the protection of our beloved planet, Earth.
Contact dinCloud, an ATSG company, for robust Cloud Computing services and solutions that can enable your enterprise to go through an environmentally sustainable transition, in a seamless manner.
