Google has created a statistic that displays the global cleanliness of the company’s cloud regions. The growing issue of computing pollution could be slowed down by switching to cloud computing.
In an email interview, David Linthicum, the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting, stated, “We’re basically doing more with less due to reduced power consumption and emissions.”
Furthermore, cloud computing is more efficient than on-site computer use, according to Linthicum. “Aggregated computing and storage resources are motivating enterprises to move from discrete corporate data centers to better utilized and shared resources in public clouds,” he stated.
Assessing Clean Energy
Google refers to this new indicator as the CFE%, or Carbon-Free Energy percentage. The figure represents the average proportion of fossil fuel and carbon-free energy utilized to run Google’s data centers.
Based on the amount of carbon-free energy generated on the local grid at a given moment, the company determines the CFE% for each region. And the cloud is cleaner, according to the company’s statistics.
By 2030, the search engine giant claims to only want to use carbon-free energy. In the upcoming years, the majority of the biggest cloud providers—including Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services—have committed to turning their cloud data centers carbon neutral.
“Completely decarbonizing our data center electricity supply is the critical next step in realizing a carbon-free future,” Google wrote on its blog.
Each Google cloud region will be provided with a combination of decreasing amounts of fossil fuel-based energy and increasing amounts of carbon-free energy in order to reach this aim. Our percentage of carbon-free energy serves as a gauge for our progress along this route.”
According to Linthicum, using cloud computing could benefit the environment. “You can think of it as the way we consume power from the grid,” he stated.
“While it’s more economical and less polluting to purchase power from a centralized power plant, versus generating it ourselves, we can leverage smart technology in our homes to further optimize what we do with the power that we consume.”
How to Clean Up Cloud Computing
In an email interview, Roger Andersson, a senior director of Pensando, the cloud computing business, stated that eco-friendliness requires proper implementation of cloud computing.
“It’s not inherently green, but it can be a green approach to computing if done properly by building energy-efficient buildings for cloud data centers that are powered by sustainable energy sources, i.e. wind and solar,” Andersson stated.
According to Andersson, using a cloud service provider for computing needs is far more viable for businesses than constructing their own data centers.
“It would use more energy for a company to transport components and run a data center on their own (that might also rely on fossil fuels) instead of doing it via a more efficient cloud service provider,” he stated.
Certain cloud technologies are more productive than others. According to KloudGin, the producer of cloud platforms, corporate users can only use resources when necessary.
When we digitize workflows, our solutions also remove the need for paper. Paper use decreases waste and improves worker, asset management, mobile field service, and customer service efficiency.”
However, there is a drawback to the pay-for-use model, according to Asim Razzaq, CEO of cloud cost management startup Yotascale, in an email interview.
“Because not everyone has the ability to accurately predict their usage, cloud compute capacity is quite often overprovisioned and goes unused, adding to compute carbon footprint,” Razzaq stated.
“Between 25% and 40% of cloud compute is underutilized, in large part to ensure uptime and customer experience is not compromised.”
By utilizing specific components for networking and security services, cloud providers can also lower the amount of energy they use.