A joint study recently released by consulting firms Accenture and WSP Environment and Energy, examines the impact of cloud computing solutions on energy consumption at small and large businesses, and finds that most businesses see a significant reductions in net energy use.
With representative companies supporting work forces between 100 and 10,000, the study compared the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions equated to on-premise and cloud versions of regularly-used business productivity applications, such as email, content management, and CRM. Findings show that smaller businesses can reduce their effective carbon footprint by as much as 90%, while large corporation should see around a 30% reduction.
Likening a company’s data infrastructure to an urban freeway system, cloud computing would be taking the bus to work or joining a carpool, only without the sacrifice in convenience or performance. This analogy is based on the consideration that the average server, in the average company, utilizes about 10% of its capacity. The on-premise server therefore is the single passenger car, which would expend the same amount of energy if it was full of coworkers.
Further citing economies of scale created by higher utilization of servers, dynamic provisioning, and multi-tenancy, researchers conclude that cloud computing is an opportunity for organizations of all sizes to create efficiencies and energy savings not possible with their current information management infrastructures.
Read more at Forbes.comand download a detailed whitepaper from Microsoft Environment.
