Cloud Tech News

A whitepaper from Melbourne’s Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) has cast doubt on traditional thinking regarding the energy consumption of cloud computing. “Previous analysis and industry focus has missed the point,” blistered the Power of Wireless Cloud report to open its executive summary. “Access networks, not data centres, are the biggest threat to the sustainability of cloud services.”

Google has calculated that an SME can lower its energy usage by 65%-85% simply by switching to the cloud.

A new report has suggested that cloud computing is generally a better option than on-premise when looking to save energy, but it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

A recent post on the Google Green Blog has revealed that the US General Services Administration saved $285,000 in energy consumption after switching to cloud based apps.

With the likes of cloud computing and virtualisation starting to become staples for today’s business, IT environments are continuing to grow in complexity. Furthermore, there is growing pressure on many organisations to reduce the environmental impact of their IT systems.

Large companies that move their data storage into the cloud could slash their carbon emissions by up to 50%, according to a new European study. The London based Carbon Disclosure Project focussed on large firms un the UK and France and found that these companies could achieve significant cost savings by 2020 if they moved their IT systems onto shared networks.

Global adoption and growth of SaaS within enterprises is unevenly distributed yet growing rapidly.  One of the primary catalysts moving this forward are Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and other platform providers lowering the barriers to creating new applications, continually investing in security technologies, and streamlining rapid prototyping, testing, and release of SaaS applications.

The Canadian Federal Government recently announced plans to create a single IT department ‘Shared Services’ that will save $100-200m a year through consolidation-driven efficiencies. As highlighted in this fact sheet there is lots of ‘low hanging fruit’ for cost savings due to a spread of many different email systems, networks and data-centres.