ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE CLOUD

Environmental Impact of the Cloud



Environmental Impact of the Cloud

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Introduction

Cloud computing—large-scale, shared IT infrastructure available over the internet—is transforming the way corporate IT services are delivered and managed. To assess the environmental impact of cloud computing, Microsoft engaged with Accenture—a leading technology, consulting and outsourcing company—and WSP Environment & Energy—a global consultancy dedicated to environmental and sustainability issues—to compare the energy useand carbon footprint of Microsoft cloud offerings for businesses with corresponding Microsoft on-premise deployments.

Though large organizations can lower energy use and emissions by addressing some of these factors in their own data centers, providers of public cloud infrastructure are best positioned to reduce the environmental impact of IT because of their scale. By moving applications to cloud services offered by Microsoft or other providers, IT decisionmakers can take advantage of highly efficient cloud infrastructure, effectively “outsourcing” their IT efficiency investments while helping their company achieve its sustainability goals. Beyond the commonly cited benefits of cloud computing—such as cost savings and increased agility—cloud computing has the potential to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of many business applications

Background

Both cloud computing and sustainability are emerging as transformative trends in business and society. Most consumers (whether they are aware of it or not) are already heavy users of cloud-enabled services, including email, social media, online gaming, and many mobile applications. The business community has begun to embrace cloud computing as a viable option to reduce costs and to improve IT and business agility. At the same time, sustainability continues to gain importance as a performance indicator for organizations and their IT departments. Corporate sustainability officers, regulators and other stakeholders have become increasingly focused on IT's carbon footprint, and organizations are likewise placing more emphasis on developing long-term strategies to reduce their carbon footprint through more sustainable operations and products. Cloud service providers are making significant investments in data center infrastructure to provide not only raw computing power but also Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business applications for their customers.

New data centers are being built at ever-larger scales and with increased server density, resulting in greater energy consumption. The Smart 2020 report “Enabling the Low Carbon Economy In the Information Age” estimates that the environmental footprint from data centers will more than triple between 2002 and 2020, making them the fastest-growing contributor to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector's carbon footprint.

Discussion

Building upon previous analysis work with Microsoft, Accenture and WSP Environment & nergy developed a quantitative model to calculate the energy use and carbon footprint of an organization's IT applications for both cloud and on-premise deployment. This approach aligns with the assessment methodology developed by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), the industry consortium promoting sustainability on behalf of leading ICT companies.

The model quantifies energy use and carbon emissions on a per-user basis. To account for the fact that on-premise server counts do not follow a linear scale as user counts increase, the research analyzes the impact among three different sizes of user groups: small (100 users), medium (1,000 users) ...