Transitioning to the cloud has the potential to be a carbon-cutting strategy—your cloud deployment and management are key to exactly how sustainable your IT infrastructure can be.
Sustainability is a Key Benefit of a Well-Built Cloud Architecture
Earth Day is this week, so let’s dive right in and talk about sustainability. In 2022, AWS added sustainability as a sixth pillar in its Well-Architected Framework, which defines the AWS best principles for cloud deployment and management. AWS and Microsoft Azure have both committed to sourcing their electricity from 100% renewable energy by 2025. Terms like green cloud and sustainable cloud litter the cloud computing landscape. At the same time, the data centers where hyperscalers operate servers are massive consumers of electricity, and that consumption is only growing. Migrating to the cloud can feel sustainable because the electricity usage is shifted to another entity, out of sight. But for sustainability to be meaningful to your customers, it has to be real, not simply a diversion.
So. Is the cloud sustainable?
As with so many other aspects of cloud, the answer is: it depends.
Cloud computing was estimated to use approximately 1% of all the world’s electricity as of summer 2021; that figure is projected to rise to as much as 8% by 2030. Assuming the renewable energy promise for the largest cloud providers comes to pass and that a sufficient amount of such power is in production to support the growth in energy use, future cloud sustainability looks promising. And in theory, consolidating servers into massive data centers that focus on efficiency should always use less energy than running on-premises servers, which, while estimates vary, are universally considered to waste more capacity than cloud servers, because they have to be configured to handle peak capacity at all times, rather than taking advantage of cloud scalability and elasticity to right-size IT capacity. Cooling all those servers should be easier when they’re consolidated, as well. But those benefits assume that cloud adoptions take the form of digital transformations, not one-size-fits-all lift-and-shift migrations, which tend to result in ill-fitted cloud deployments that don’t deliver the potential cost or energy savings the cloud promises. Cloud energy use projections also don’t necessarily take into account shifts in cloud usage. AI, machine learning, and advanced data functions, all of which are presently accelerating at breakneck speed, use more electricity than simpler cloud computing activities.
Cloud providers’ move to 100% renewable energy should benefit them, as well. As they become more widely used, renewable energy sources have fallen below fossil fuel prices; in other words, that transition should save AWS and Microsoft money as well as reducing the cloud’s carbon footprint and serving the needs of customers who prize sustainability among their corporate values. The market for powering a sustainable cloud could also drive expansion of current renewable energy sources and innovation in developing new ones in order to meet demand.
What does that all mean for you, as a leader whose customers may care deeply about sustainability in the products and organizations they patronize? In this moment, it means that transitioning to the cloud has the potential to be a carbon-cutting strategy. It also means that your cloud deployment and management are key to exactly how sustainable your IT infrastructure can be.
The same principles that inform cost optimization are highly applicable for sustainability. This only makes sense: When you choose to responsibly manage your cloud environment in terms of storage, operations, and ongoing maintenance, you should save cost and energy consumption. A cloud deployment that begins with a deep-dive discovery process, proceeds with refactoring and replacing any functions that can be improved in the cloud environment, and is professionally maintained via expert managed services will very likely both save money on cloud costs and reduce your IT carbon footprint. Furthermore, the quarterly architecture reviews and cost optimization analyses included in Cascadeo’s managed services keep IT efficiency top of mind. Specific aspects of your architecture can help advance your environment’s overall energy efficiency, as well, as detailed here by Cascadeo Field CTO and AWS Ambassador JV Roig.
Whether responsible energy consumption is a key part of your corporate image or simply a way to appeal to the 60-78% of consumers who report in surveys that they value sustainability enough to pay more for products and packaging that embody it, migrating to an optimized cloud environment presents your greenest possible digital future.
