Data centre operators have kept global electricity consumption steady since 2010, despite a 15-fold increase in global internet traffic. This was mainly thanks to huge advances in efficiency and advances in data centre design.
But with electricity supplies under pressure, international calls to cut carbon emissions, continuing to find efficiencies will prove to be more important than ever.
Carbon-thoughtful cloud
So, what should businesses do? Accenture’s recent report, The Green Behind the Cloud, shows that a carbon-thoughtful migration from individually built and operated on-premise data centres to the public cloud can dramatically reduce environmental impact. In some cases, this can cut CO2 emissions by around 59 million tons annually – roughly equal to taking 22 million cars off the road.
What’s more, public cloud’s workload flexibility, improved server utilisation rates, and the energy-efficient infrastructure can also seriously reduce costs when migration is managed correctly. According to Accenture, migrations to public cloud result in up to 30-40% total cost of ownership savings.
The first step on this journey is to choose a provider that factors in the environmental impact of the full public-cloud lifecycle – in other words how they plan, build, power, operate and retire their data centres in a sustainable way.
Data centre sustainability
Google, for example, already enables customers to reduce the carbon footprint of their IT operations thanks to its sustainable cloud platform. One way Google accomplishes this is via its intelligent infrastructure, which has the capability to use machine learning to decide where, when and how data should be processed in order to achieve new levels of energy efficiency – cutting both costs and carbon use.
Google’s data centres are already twice as energy efficient as a typical data centre and they deliver five times more computing power for the same amount of electricity consumed, compared with five years ago. The company also recently set the target of operating entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030, placing it firmly in the vanguard of the move towards sustainable data centre operations.
“Sustainability, powered by technology, is the biggest opportunity for businesses and individuals to solve their current challenges,” says Christine Rauh, Accenture Technology Sustainability Lead, Austria and Switzerland. “Integrating technology such as smart sensors and solar panels can result in cost savings and operational efficiency which is equivalent to sustainability.
“Other opportunities include the ability to comply with regulations based on the right choice of technology. From our point of view sustainability can be seen as an investment in a business advantage.”
Accenture identifies three ambition levels when designing and implementing a sustainable cloud strategy. It says the greater the ambition the greater the financial and environmental return on investment:
- The first level of ambition involves a standard on-premise-to-cloud migration, which can, on average, cut energy consumption by 65% and carbon emissions by 84%.
- Ambition level two involves selecting the right programming language for compute tasks. This can cut energy consumption by a factor of 50.
- Companies that go the extra mile, however, and configure applications for the cloud can stretch carbon emission reductions to 98%.
Futureproofing your data strategy
Cloud migration has historically driven big financial, agility and security gains for companies, but now more firms are recognising the sustainability benefits that this technology brings. Going forward, companies that adopt a carbon-thoughtful approach to cloud migration will also future-proof their data strategy as the threat of regulation and environmental reporting increases.