Seeking to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint? Look to the Cloud (PART 2)

The biggest hurdle for most corporations attempting to reduce their carbon footprint is affordability. For many businesses, making certain changes simply isn’t financially feasible, even if they’d like to embrace a greener business model.

When making the move to cloud computing, the opposite is true. Consider the ways cloud solutions can reduce carbon dioxide emissions: dynamic provisioning, multi-tenancy, server utilization, improved data center efficiency. And all of these approaches are also cost-effective. On average, corporations adding an in-house server will be saddled with 234 kilowatt hours (Kwh) a month. That’s per server, and those servers are sitting idle more than 90 percent of the time, but drawing energy anyway. Cooling that server at a PUE above 2.0 more than doubles that energy consumption. 500-plus KWh per server cannot compete with cloud-based servers sitting comfortably under 50 Kwh.

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