Cloud computing can reduce carbon emissions by 30%: study
08 Nov 2010
Businesses that choose to run business applications in the cloud can help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by a net 30 per cent or more versus running those same applications on their own infrastructure.
These findings, from a study commissioned by Microsoft Corp and conducted by global management consulting firm Accenture and rnvironment consulting firm WSP Environment & Energy, says large datacentres, like those run by Microsoft, benefit from economies of scale and operational efficiencies beyond what corporate IT departments can achieve.
It said that benefits become even more significant for a small business moving to the cloud, where the net energy and carbon savings can be more than 90 per cent.
The study results focused on three widely deployed and commonly used Microsoft applications for e-mail, content sharing and customer relationship management. Customers can choose to install each application on their own IT infrastructure or use the corresponding Microsoft cloud application.
The study results suggest that choosing the cloud option can enable a significant reduction in carbon emissions. While the findings represent an illustrative case for selected Microsoft applications, it is likely that similar advantages can be observed across many applications and cloud service providers.
The study assessed the carbon footprint of server, networking and storage infrastructure for three different deployment sizes (100, 1,000 and 10,000 users), finding that the smaller the organisation, the larger the benefit of switching to the cloud.
When small organisations (100 users) move to the cloud, the effective carbon footprint reduction could be up to a 90 per cent savings by using a shared cloud environment instead of their own local servers.
