Green Cloud Computing: Helping Businesses In Reducing Their Carbon Footprints
In the fast-paced scenario today, most companies are actively seeking solutions to reduce the overall environmental impact using cloud computing. Businesses are investing enormously to become a part of the green initiatives – the one that supports energy-efficient cloud computing practices while lowering carbon footprint, a concept popularly known as Green Cloud Computing. Green Computing strategically channelizes the business capabilities to avail agility, reliability, scalability, adaptability, and productivity to build a carbon-neutral future. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the ongoing expansion and adoption of Green cloud computing can prevent more than one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions between 2021 and 2024. This article details an effective switch to cloud-based data operations that is not just economical but relatively easier for users. It’s said to be a brilliant way to satisfy a company’s green initiatives and environmental goals.
Green cloud is a highly advanced and futuristic simulator for energy-aware cloud computing data centers with a central focus on cloud communications. This mechanism gives detailed information about energy consumption by the data center IT equipment such as network switches, computing servers, and communication channels. The monitoring helps to develop innovative and advanced solutions that further enhance the business outputs by resource allocation, monitoring, task scheduling, overburden mapping, and optimizing communication protocols and network infrastructures.
As opposed to the physical servers that are still known to take on-premises storage and physical hardware to function – Green Cloud solutions move away from physical resources and save energy and physical space. The services get routed through virtualization using virtual machines, and multi-tenancy which allows multiple organizations to share the workforce without sacrificing their performance.
Green cloud computing comes with an unsaid benefit which drives away the major tension by reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Generally speaking, following a lifecycle of production to transport and all the way to disposal – all the components utilize network devices that produce GHG. In Green Cloud, the total GHG emitted is substantially reduced due to the virtual form of systems and Green IT hardware together with sustainable software engineering practices.
Firms moving their workloads to the cloud tend to remove a large portion of their IT operations which get outsourced to the cloud provider for instance the deployment of hardware, management, security, etc. This just not frees up the resources time but also builds business-enabling solutions without consuming energy.
Likewise, Cloud computing empowers employees to obtain business applications and data at any point of the day regardless of their physical presence at the workplace. Whether catching a flight at the airport or staying at home. Cloud-based remote work ensures seamless and smooth processes with highly available IT Infrastructure that helps organizations to narrow down office space and on-site requirements.
Therefore, the shift to Green Cloud is paving the way to reduce carbon footprint and financial strain while delivering high business goals with overall efficiency. It is proving to be a boon for businesses of all sizes – big and small and is only going to become more widespread. Gartner suggests that the cloud computing market revenue in Southeast Asia is estimated to reach US$40.32 billion by 2025 which in turn is leading to a greater demand for cloud computing among SMEs. Hence, it is true to say that most businesses are working their way to create a positive impact by using cloud computing – investing in massive and impactful green initiatives.
(The author is Mr. Bala Peddigari, IEEE Member and the views expressed in this article are his own)
