Sustainability Is Imperative for Businesses – The Cloud Can Help

Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart! . . . Cloud? 

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly crucial goal for companies worldwide, but you don’t need to summon Captain Planet to reach your sustainability goals. 

Making your company more sustainable means reducing its carbon footprint and making a positive difference in your community – that, we know. 

But becoming more environmentally friendly also has positive economic advantages. 

Even the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, had this to say in his Letter to CEOs: “We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.”¹ 

How does becoming more sustainable help grow your bottom line? 

Taking steps to make your business operations more sustainable can grow your bottom line by reducing costs, improving risk and compliance management, increasing revenue by improving your reputation among customers and other stakeholders, and attracting talent. 

Cost reduction: Implementing energy-efficient practices like moving to the cloud can help companies reduce their energy bills – not to mention hardware and labor costs.  

Risk and compliance management: Implementing sustainable practices can reduce environmental risks like carbon emissions and improve compliance with environmental regulations.  

Increased revenue via improved reputation: According to a recent report, 66% of US consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainable products.² 

Talent attraction: A 2021 survey found that 51% of business students would accept a lower salary if the company they worked for was environmentally responsible,³ and almost 50% of millennials and Gen Zers said they have made career choices based on their personal ethics.⁴ 

Fortunately, companies can use the cloud to become more sustainable and reap the rewards that come with it. The cloud offers many advantages that can help your business become more green. 

How does the cloud help sustainability and environmental goals? 

1. Cloud data centers run on renewable energy

Greener cloud services with renewable energy was a top technology trend in 2022, and that trend continues into 2024. 

Renewable energy is an integral part of becoming more sustainable. And top public cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure use renewable energy from sources like solar and wind farms to power their data centers. 

Their sustainability efforts don’t stop there. For example, AWS has pledged to power their operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 and are committed to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040.⁵ 

Additionally, Google aims to run its data centers completely on carbon-free energy by 2030.⁶ 

Rounding out the top 3 cloud providers, and perhaps the most ambitious goal, is Microsoft’s commitment to procure enough renewable energy to cover 100% of their electricity by 2025 and become carbon negative by 2030.⁷

2. Cloud data centers are more energy efficient

Cloud data centers are more energy efficient than on-premises data centers. Google data centers, for instance, are twice as energy efficient as a typical on-prem data center,⁶ and Amazon claims to be 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of surveyed enterprise data centers in the US.⁸ A major reason why cloud data centers are so efficient is that they are designed for optimal utilization, air circulation, and temperature.  

Many cloud providers are even taking further steps to become sustainable, such as building data centers underground or in cold climates to cool down their servers. Building data centers underwater is even a possibility, as Microsoft’s Project Natick found that underwater data centers are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably.⁹ 

Moreover, public cloud providers tend to build their data centers near the actual power sources, which helps to mitigate the amount of electricity lost during transmission.  

When an enterprise builds its own data center, however, the location is limited by how much it’s willing to invest. The location may even be limited to their own office building.  

While you could just move your offices to a colder climate to bring in some efficiency, I would not like to work in the same building as Meta’s Luleå data center, for example, where the average daily highs are below freezing.

3. Cloud data centers have better resource provisioning

In addition to more energy-efficient buildings, the infrastructure housed in these data centers is also more energy efficient.  

On-premises data centers often have low utilization rates, meaning that they do not utilize even close to 100% of their maximum capacity.  

As companies must plan for and accommodate usage spikes and growth in demand, it’s understandable to over-provision. However, idle hardware grows a company’s carbon footprint for no gain (and increases costs). 

Public cloud providers, on the other hand, are able to have much higher utilization rates. 

They do this by taking advantage of multi-tenancy, meaning multiple customers share the same computing resources (while still being separate in a non-physical sense). This allows cloud providers to have just the right amount of servers and storage devices. 

If companies want to forgo a complete migration to the cloud, the cloud can still help. Through a process called cloud bursting, on-premises data centers can take advantage of cloud computing resources only when on-prem capacity has been reached.

4. Cloud data centers use better, more energy-efficient servers

Moving to the cloud can also drastically cut down on the amount of wattage in other ways. Due to their superior hardware setup, data centers created and run by public cloud providers require less electricity. 

They use techniques such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), which enables devices to carry out tasks with the least amount of power usage. 

In addition to this, public cloud providers tend to upgrade their hardware on much shorter refresh cycles than on-premises data centers follow, which means more energy-efficient, and better, servers.

5. The cloud improves communication and collaboration while reducing emissions

By using cloud-based tools, companies can share information and collaborate with their stakeholders more quickly and easily. This can help businesses reduce their environmental impact by eliminating the need to travel for meetings and conferences.  

Seamless communication and collaboration is especially important to support the future of work, as cloud tools better support a remote workforce. 

Additionally, using cloud-based tools like the ones provided by the top three cloud providers can help businesses track their sustainability efforts and make more informed decisions about their operations. Cloud resource utilization reports are thorough and detailed, including how long a customer used a particular resource. These reports give customers the opportunity for their engineering teams to optimize and reduce the utilization costs. 

Conclusion 

Make no mistake, I’m not saying that moving to the cloud will take pollution down to zero, but it will undoubtedly lower your carbon footprint. Accenture found that migrating to the cloud can reduce CO2 emissions by 59 million tons per year.¹⁰ 

Who wouldn’t want to be part of this? Especially when the cloud can also help your enterprise reduce costs and become more agile and innovative. 

So what are you waiting for? As Captain Planet says, the power is yours. 

And Relevantz can help. 

What Relevantz Can Do for You 

Relevantz has been helping enterprises in their cloud journey by deploying cloud environments, providing migration and needed development services to move traditional non-cloud applications to the cloud environment, and developing cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure, and GCP. We can help your enterprise in any stage of your cloud journey to adopt and leverage cloud capabilities to reach your business goals. 

Want to become more sustainable by migrating to the cloud?