Venyu Blog

Just in case you needed another reason to move your data to the cloud, along comes new research that shows enterprises running business applications in the cloud can cut energy consumption and carbon emissions by a net 30%+ when compared to running those same applications on their own infrastructure.

The research, profiled in the article “New Research Gives Hard Numbers on How Cloud Computing Improves Environment,” found that while large datacenters can benefit from economies of scale and operational efficiencies beyond what corporate IT departments can achieve on their own, “benefits can be even more pronounced for a small business moving to the cloud, where the net energy and carbon savings can be more than 90% according to the study.

In the context of benchmarks, the study examined three different deployment sizes (100, 1,000 and 10,000 users) which found that the smaller the organization, the larger the benefit of switching to the cloud. Key factors associated with the lower energy use and reduced carbon emissions enabled by the cloud included:

Dynamic Provisioning. Large operations enable better matching of server capacity to demand on an ongoing basis.

Multitenancy. Large public cloud environments are able to serve millions of users at thousands of companies simultaneously on massive shared infrastructure.

Server utilization. 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.

Datacenter efficiency. Through innovation and continuous improvement, cloud providers are leading the way in designing, building and operating data centers that minimize energy use for a given amount of computing power.

According to one of the research sponsors, cloud computing is more economical and IT resources used more efficiently when business applications are run in a shared environment which, in his words, “contribute to the reduction of energy consumption per unit of work, thereby helping to significantly reduce carbon.”

A whitepaper featuring details of this study is now available for download.

Former Vice-President Gore could not be reached for comment.