Driving sustainability through cloud and modernisation
The IT sector is now one of the main contributors to climate change. Researchers estimate the emissions footprint of information and communications technology worldwide to be around 1.8% to 2.8%—roughly the same size as the entire aviation industry (2.1%). It’s an uncomfortable fact, particularly as technology has become so embedded in our daily lives.
But the driving force behind this increase in emissions is more than just our growing reliance on technology. In setting up data centres, IT managers often buy more servers than they need, just in case. However, most only run at around 20% capacity—that’s a lot of waste, especially if you multiply it out across industries.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. Cloud technology enables organisations to share resources and only use what they need when they need it. By pooling resources, customers can create economies of scale, substantially reducing costs and energy consumption. Moreover, cloud services are elastic; they can expand and contract on demand according to an organisation’s requirements, eliminating risks of insufficient capacity and waste. From small businesses to large government departments, any organisation can dramatically improve its sustainability by moving to the cloud.
Instantly reduce your carbon consumption
Undertaking a simple ‘lift and shift’ of your infrastructure from datacentres to ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) can immediately generate substantial carbon savings. All the major cloud vendors are investing heavily in green energy at a level that would be out of reach for most organisations. As their customer, any power you consume through your cloud service will most likely come from a renewable source, instantly reducing your carbon footprint.
Calculate your footprint more accurately
At Kainos, as part of our mission to support our customers in building sustainable infrastructure that benefits their organisation and the planet, we’ve developed our Cloud Carbon Reduction Calculator. The calculator helps organisations estimate their current carbon emissions and compare them to what they could be if they migrated to the cloud. Customers that have used the tool have uncovered huge savings.
For example, a global NGO reduced its carbon emissions by 92% by migrating three data centres in just six months to the public cloud. A government organisation went a step further in its cloud migration by adopting ‘Platform as a Service' (PaaS), cutting its operational carbon emissions by an enormous 94%, the equivalent of recycling 22,296 bags of rubbish annually.
Moreover, as soon as you adopt cloud, it’s much easier to calculate your carbon footprint since all hyperscaler cloud providers publish their carbon data. With more accurate data, it’s easier to set and meet targets and be confident in your reporting.
Modernise
Once you’re in the cloud, you can further modernise your environment to make incremental savings and ensure you’ve left all wasteful practices behind. For instance, you might consider grouping tasks together, or batch processing. An example of batch processing would be grouping non-time-critical database queries together to reduce the amount of time and energy spent handling them or choosing to only process invoices during a four-hour window each month. The advantage of batch processing is that you can switch programs off when you don’t need them, saving energy.
Another example of modernisation is to go serverless, only running services and applications as and when needed without building traditional servers albeit virtual servers. It can be helpful to work with a partner such as Kainos to identify where you can modernise your organisation’s products, services, and processes.
You can also expand your cloud strategy to incorporate other services that help cut carbon emissions. By modernising your products to incorporate ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS). Like IaaS, PaaS includes infrastructure, but also other pay-as-you-go shared resources, such as message queues, development tools, and databases. With PaaS, you only call on a service when you need it, minimising your consumption.
You could even go one step further and adopt ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). This allows you to reduce the number of programs you need to be installed on your systems, cutting down on licence, maintenance, and upgrade costs. While software providers don’t currently have to publish their carbon data, that is likely to change soon. Once that data is available, it will be even easier to calculate potential carbon reductions more accurately.
As a final helping hand, there are also emission monitoring tools and dashboards available from the different cloud providers, for example, Microsoft has created an Emissions Impact Dashboard. The aim of these tools is to help organisations track carbon emissions associated with their services and help predict future emission reduction opportunities.
A more sustainable future
While we may be facing a climate crisis, the good news is that vendors are recognising the urgency to act. As time goes on, we might even see an open carbon data economy developing, in which APIs provide data on their carbon emissions to enable customers to run microservices in different cloud environments and optimise their carbon footprint. Cloud technology offers hope for the planet, but only if we prioritise sustainability today.
If you’d like to find out how Kainos can accelerate your journey to sustainability through technology, contact us today.