Cloud Computing, The Enabler of Green IT

Green IT is defined as an ecologically-sustainable design, production, sourcing, usage, and disposal of IT products and services in order to reduce carbon emissions and e-waste and at the same time improve energy efficiency.

How Cloud Computing Helps in enabling Green IT practices.

Cloud Computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

There are several technologies and concepts employed by cloud providers to achieve better utilization and efficiency than traditional computing.

Dynamic Provisioning

Most businesses have hard-to-predict, fluctuating resource requirements. The conservative approach of Infrastructure provisioning, which is to deploy servers, networking, and storage resources to handle the peak load, results in under-utilized resources. The Cloud Computing approach ensures the allocation of resources according to demand. Those applications that require fewer resources can be consolidated on the same server. Thus, data centers always maintain the active servers according to current demand, which results in low energy consumption than the conservative approach of over-provisioning.

Multi-Tenancy

The Cloud providers serve multiple companies on the same infrastructure and software. This approach not just reduces cost through economies of scale but is also more energy-efficient than multiple copies of software installed on different infrastructure.

Virtualization

Virtualization is a foundational technology for deploying cloud-based infrastructure that allows a single physical server to run multiple operating system images concurrently. As an enabler of consolidation, server virtualization reduces the total physical server footprint, which has inherent green benefits.

Datacenter Efficiency

The power efficiency of data-centers has a major impact on the total energy usage of Cloud computing. By using the most energy-efficient technologies, cloud providers can significantly improve the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of their data centers. Data centers that utilize cloud technologies prove to be far more efficient as compared to traditional data centers. Traditional internet data centers lose a lot of energy due to server under utilization, which is completely eliminated on the cloud.

“By the year 2025, businesses with over 100 employees using one or more application in the cloud will account for a 90% reduction of Global Emission, 38% reduction in overall energy expenditure, 200 million barrels of oil saved in annual carbon emission, and $12.3 billion in combined annual energy cost saving”

So, moving to the cloud helps an organization’s agenda of overall cost reduction, the flexibility of work practices as well as reduce carbon emission and e-waste. No wonder cloud computing is seen as the way ahead for the global IT world.