Cloud Computing | eco-officiency blog

There has been a lot of press lately on cloud computing that is not only good for data management but also a great green solution for businesses. It offers tremendous energy savings and IT efficiencies. Here are some of the recent reports and articles available on cloud computing;

Green Biz recent article, 4 Reasons Why Cloud Computing is a Green Solution, cites that cloud computing services are expected to grow by 22% annually to 2020. It also discusses the four top reasons cloud computing is a green solution including energy efficiency, utilization and consolidation efficiencies, pay per use and multitenancy.

Accenture put out a great whitepaper called, Cloud Computing and Sustainability, in November 2010 that discusses in more depth how cloud computing reduces the environmental impacts of IT and also provides case study examples.

The Carbon Disclosure Project in collaboration with Verdantix also did a report called, Cloud Computing: The IT Solution for the 21^st Century. It cites that businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue can achieve in energy savings of $12.3 billion a year by 2020 through cloud computing services. In addition it projects an overall 30,000 metric tons savings in CO2 reduction.

Then Greenpeace report entitled How Dirty is Your Data, discusses the cloud’s energy footprint on these large cloud based service providers. It provides a table and report card on the primary cloud service providers and their use of clean energy vs. coal.

One of the primary hesitations of moving to the cloud is the security and privacy issue. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a publication on the Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing. The U.S. General Services Administration is moving all their data to a cloud based provider and now offering these services to government agencies. Learn more from Information Week Government article, Cloud Computer is Safer Than You Think, on how they overcame these challenges.

That is what Rob Bernard, the chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, is projecting in his latest article in Sustainable Industries. Microsoft recently commissioned a study with Accenture to analyze the energy and greenhouse gas use for cloud-hosted systems such as Microsoft versus on their own hosted systems.

The study found that organizations could save energy and carbon by switching to the cloud. It found the smaller the organization, the larger the benefit. The study predicted an effective carbon footprint reduction of up to 90 percent over using local servers for smaller organizations (less than 100 people). For large corporations, the predicted savings were typically 30 percent or more. This is a pretty remarkable carbon and energy savings for smaller businesses.

In addition, cloud computing services can generally save companies money. It ranges from 25-50% savings in your IT costs. PC Computing has a nice article, 13 Terrific Cloud Services for Small Businesses, which provides an overview of companies that offer cloud based computing for small companies.