Cloud Computing Can Cut Carbon Emissions

by Susan DeFreitas

E-mail, content sharing and customer relationship management-if your business is currently running any of these applications on its own infrastructure, it could cut its computing carbon footprint by at much as 30 percent by moving operations to "the cloud," according to a new study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Accenture and WSP Environment & Energy. Cloud computing works, essentially, by allowing users to stop running computing applications on their own computers and have them run, instead, by large data centers which benefit from economies of scale. These data centers, according to Microsoft, achieve operational efficiencies beyond what even large corporate IT departments can achieve-and the smaller the business, the more it energy it can save. The study assessed the carbon footprint of server, networking and storage infrastructure for three different deployment sizes (100, 1,000 and 10,000 users). For large corporations, the study showed typical savings of 30 percent or more in energy consumption and carbon emissions using cloud applications, while small organizations (100 users) showed a effective carbon footprint reduction of as much as 90 percent, simply by using a shared cloud environment instead of their own servers. Microsoft calls this an opportunity for businesses to effectively 'outsource' their IT efficiency investments while working towards achieving sustainability goals. The complete white paper is available online. Reprinted with permission from EarthTechling

Post originale: http://featured.matternetwork.com/2010/11/cloud-computing-can-cut-carbon.cfm