Businesses tracking their carbon emissions or carbon footprints typically have a number of energy-saving strategies in place. Internet usage, however, is usually neglected when it comes to emission reductions.
Laurence Webb from Amee, an environmental data company, says that intensive data users should calculate their ‘internet footprints’ and consider moving to the Cloud to reduce their carbon footprints.
Some businesses are not aware that the servers in data centres use massive amount of power. According to Webb, there are more than half a million data centres around the world. Every year, they use 2% of total energy consumed and emit around 300 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per annum.
Webb says that data centres are the biggest source of emissions in businesses in service industries such as information services, media, and finance. A study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has shown that cloud centres or third party data centres are much more environmentally friendly than onsite servers.
However, switching to the Cloud can be much more expensive, so the viability of switching to the Cloud for environmental reasons will depend on the business’s priorities.
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