Operating independently and flexibly
Cloud Hosting: How to reduce
your Carbon Footprint
and your Operating Costs
your
and
High global carbon dioxide emissions are partly to blame for climate change and therefore for events such as flood disasters, earthquakes and forest fires 🔥 as well as global species extinction. 🐧 So for many companies, it is an important goal to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Migration to the cloud ☁️ can contribute to this.
Climate Change and its Consequences
It has been known for years that climate change will have (and already has) devastating consequences for the earth. The flood disaster in mid-July last year brought this home to us once again. It cost more than 180 lives in Germany and caused billions in property damage. If the experts’ forecasts prove correct, such extreme weather events will occur more and more frequently worldwide in the future.
And there is no such thing as “Planet B” - which is why initiatives such as “Fridays for Future” are being set up to campaign for climate protection and also call on companies to act sustainably.
Data Servers cause high Carbon Dioxide Emissions in a Company
On the one hand, digital technologies help to mitigate the climate crisis - but on the other hand, IT also causes its own carbon dioxide footprint. This is a general indicator of the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions released by a company, an individual process or a product.
Many companies work with an own server to process and store their data, but on-premises servers sometimes require tons of hardware and a power supply around the clock and need to be permanently cooled - just to keep a single company running. What about companies working with a cloud?
On-Premises vs. Cloud: what’s the Difference?
Let’s take another look at the difference between the terms “On-Premises” and “Cloud”. With the On-Premises hosting option, you buy or rent your software and run it on your own internal company server or on rented servers from an external data center. In this case, you generally own the software.
If you opt for the cloud, you obtain your software as a service. This is where the name Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) comes from. In this case, you don’t need your own physical server, which is housed in a separate room in your company. You can imagine it like this: your data is in a central collection point - together with the data of many other companies from all over the world.
Why the Cloud is more sustainable than the On-Premises Server
Greater Scaling Effect
Various studies show that you can achieve considerable carbon dioxide savings with a cloud-based solution. One reason for this is the so-called scaling effect, which is much greater with a large cloud provider, such as Microsoft with its Public Cloud Azure, than with a small data center. As the cloud is used worldwide, the climate-friendly measures of the provider can of course have a much more far-reaching effect.
Higher Capacity Utilization
On the other hand, cloud platforms score points with much better utilization. The server or data center in the company is virtually underutilized at night and on weekends and therefore consumes “pointless” resources. A cloud system, on the other hand, achieves significantly higher utilization due to global use. This is much more efficient than if individual servers were used locally everywhere.
The effect that cloud use has on the environment can be compared to forming car pools or using public transport instead of driving your own car every distance. Your car is the on-premises server - the cloud is the BlaBlaCar ride-sharing service or the regional train.
Switching to the Cloud: this is how much Carbon Dioxide you can save
To illustrate the order of magnitude: companies globally could save just under 60 million tons of carbon dioxide a year if they all switched to the public cloud. This corresponds to approximately 5.9% of total global IT emissions and would have roughly the same effect as removing 22 million cars from global road traffic.
Small Companies benefit the most
Also interesting: the smaller the company, the greater the climate benefit of cloud migration. Small companies with around 100 users can improve their carbon dioxide balance by up to 90 percent!
Economic “Side Effect”: significantly reduce Total Cost of Ownership
In addition to the positive impact on the environment, there would also be financial benefits: with sustainable cloud solutions, a savings of 40% in total operating costs can be achieved at the same time. This is because it eliminates costs for hardware, customization, maintenance, IT staff and training, for example. With the cloud, the focus is then on subscription fees.
New Study: the Microsoft Cloud is the most Energy and Carbon Dioxide efficient
But be careful: not all cloud providers are equally sustainable. Microsoft is a good example. The software giant has been working for many years to make its own cloud services even more efficient and sustainable and to supply its data centers with even more renewable energy every year - in order to make a contribution to the environment together with its customers and partners. A study from 2018 shows: if you use Microsoft’s cloud service Azure, you can manage to produce up to 98% less carbon dioxide emissions compared to an on-premises data center. Migration therefore offers enormous savings potential!
The results lead to another impressive realization. If only 20% of the existing on-premises market in the US were to switch to the Microsoft Cloud, this would be equivalent to saving as much as the entire emissions of Washington or Turin!
Microsoft Sustainability Calculator: Overview of the Carbon Dioxide Emissions of your Azure Services
Microsoft provides its own Sustainability Calculator via AppSource. With its help, Azure customers can view and analyze their data on the carbon dioxide emissions of their Azure services via a Power BI app . This can provide them with an initial point of reference for making sustainability in the company an issue.
Microsoft has been Carbon Dioxide-neutral since 2012 - next Goal: Carbon Dioxide-negative by 2030
Microsoft sees climate protection as its responsibility and has been carbon dioxide-neutral since 2012. However, neutral is not enough for Microsoft. The global player’s next goal is to become carbon dioxide-negative by 2030 - in other words, to bind more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than the company emits.
Reduce your Carbon Footprint with Cloud Migration - and significantly reduce your Total Cost of Ownership in the Process
You have seen: vy migrating from an on-premises server to cloud services, it is possible to save significant carbon dioxide emissions and thereby make your own contribution to addressing the climate crisis - and you can reduce your total cost of ownership at the same time. Small companies in particular benefit here.
Microsoft has been pursuing a cloud-first strategy for years, and its popular cloud ERP solution Business Central is not only particularly user-friendly, but is also the fastest growing in the world.
The group is one of the cloud providers that is committed to sustainability on a large scale. Microsoft has been carbon dioxide-neutral since 2012 and is aiming to become carbon dioxide-negative by 2030.
If you would like to reduce your company’s carbon footprint and are interested in migrating to the cloud, please contact us. We will support you in this step towards sustainability.
