Johannesburg, 13 Dec 2010
Organisations that choose to run business applications in the cloud can help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by a net 30% or more versus running those same applications on their own infrastructure.
These are findings from a study by Microsoft, Accenture and WSP Environment & Energy, demonstrating cloud computing's potential to operate business applications more efficiently.
According to the study, beyond the commonly cited benefits of cloud computing - such as cost savings and increased agility - cloud computing has the potential to significantly reduce the energy use and carbon footprint associated with running business applications.
By moving applications to cloud services such as those offered by Microsoft, IT organisations can take advantage of highly efficient cloud infrastructure, thereby effectively 'outsourcing' their IT efficiency investments and helping their companies achieve sustainability goals.
Large data centres, like those run by Microsoft, benefit from economies of scale and operational efficiencies beyond what corporate IT departments can achieve. 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%.
Lower energy use and carbon emissions enabled by the cloud stem from a number of key factors, like large operations enable better matching of server capacity to demand on an ongoing basis.
“Large public cloud environments are also able to serve millions of users at thousands of companies simultaneously on one massive shared infrastructure,” the report states.
According to the study, cloud providers can drive efficiencies by increasing the portion of a server's capacity that an application actively uses, thereby performing higher workloads with a smaller infrastructure footprint.
The study focused on three widely deployed and commonly used Microsoft applications for e-mail, content sharing and customer relationship management.
Accenture says: “Customers can choose to install each application on their own IT infrastructure or use the corresponding Microsoft cloud application.”
The consulting firm also notes 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, it points out.
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 instead of using their own local servers, carbon emissions are likely to be 90% lower. For large corporations the savings are typically 30% or more.
The report also points out that through innovation and continuous improvement, cloud providers are leading the way in designing, building and operating data centres that minimise energy use for a given amount of computing power.
The study also determined that although many organisations may be able to address some of these factors in their own data centres to decrease energy use and emissions due to economies of scale, providers of large public cloud infrastructure are best positioned to help reduce the environmental impact of IT through efficiency and scale.
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