Head in the (Green) Clouds
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- April 10, 2023
As more organizations push toward net zero targets, they are discovering that moving to the cloud not only frees them from energy-guzzling on-premises data centers but that the so-called “green cloud” can be part of a broader strategy for cutting emissions.
One mining company, for example, was operating 32 data centers with nearly 2,500 servers and was planning to move to the cloud.
Part of the cloud business case was gathering data on energy consumption in the data centers and quantifying the emissions reduction that could be achieved through cloud migration.
The company worked with Accenture on this project, and the consultancy’s “green cloud advisor” platform was able to illustrate the benefits: an estimated emissions reduction of 5000 tons of CO2, a 90% reduction in the carbon footprint of its data centers, and IT improvement savings of more than USD100,000.
In addition, once migrated to the cloud, the company’s sites could more actively manage their energy consumption and contribute to the net zero goals of the wider business.
On a mission to reduce emissions
The mining company is no isolated example. Many Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders have targets to reduce emissions by 2030 and see the public cloud as part of how they can accomplish this.
According to Gartner, public cloud providers’ technology and operations can create up to 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional on-premises data centers.
The hyperscalers can invest in sourcing renewable energy, and their scale enables them to deliver shorter hardware refresh cycles, increase server utilization ratios and improve power usage effectiveness (PUE). PUE is a metric for the facility's efficiency which factors in power distribution, cooling and lighting.
An organization, for many reasons, may be tied to a particular location that sources its power from coal-fired generation. The major data centers are built increasingly close to renewable energy generation, and greenfield sites are often built in their renewable energy generation facilities.
S&P Global Market Intelligence says that running business applications on AWS, rather than on-premises enterprise data centers in Europe, could reduce energy use by nearly 80% and carbon emissions by up to 96% when Amazon purchases 100% renewable energy.
The hyperscalers can also achieve better circularity or recycling of e-waste. As Gartner points out, IT equipment generated 53.6 million tons of e-waste in 2002, only 17% of which was recycled.
In contrast, a Microsoft Circular Centre in the Netherlands achieved 83% reuse and 17% recycling of critical parts.
Public cloud providers also work with third-party IT asset disposition partners committed to international recycling certifications such as ISO 14001. At Oracle, 100% of its recycling partners have this certification, and 99.9% of their e-waste is recycled or reused.
Share the responsibility
But as Gartner analysts Henrique Cecci and Miguel Angel Borrega point out in a report released this month, organizations “can just outsource their environmental challenges to the public cloud providers.”
“Cloud sustainability is a shared responsibility between cloud providers and organizations,” the authors said.
Organizations might get some solace from reducing their scope 1 and 2 emissions. However, Scope 3 emissions – when they outsource to data centers —are still a part of their supply chain and are increasingly factored into net zero calculations.
The Gartner analysts say that while the public cloud providers are “all trending in the right direction,” they have a long way to go to “truly operate in a sustainable manner.”
“Every customer retains at least part of the responsibility to use cloud services in a sustainable way,” they say.
Their advice to I&O leaders is to place the most energy-intensive applications in the cloud and migrate them to the most sustainably operated data centers.
Because the public cloud providers also offer transparent energy use and emissions tools, I&O leaders can then use the providers’ tools to assess the relative emissions of different workloads.
The selection of regions is also essential. Some are greener than others, and two identical data centers — one powered by fossil fuels and another powered by renewable energy — will have very different carbon footprints.
Ultimately, governance frameworks are critical. The mining company which worked with Accenture took the first step in understanding the carbon footprint of its existing on-premises data centers.
This delivered an accurate point of comparison and helped build the business case for migrating not just to the cloud but to the green cloud.
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Tomwang112