Adrian Bradley, KPMG’s Head of Cloud Transformation, explores how organisations can enhance the sustainability of their cloud infrastructures.
Around 1 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide come from organisations’ datacentres. That figure needs to halve if we’re to reach net zero by 2030.
The good news is, datacentres are becoming more energy-efficient – particularly those hosted in the cloud. Hyperscale public cloud platforms are largely powered by reusable energy. And of course, the cloud is a shared resource, which is by definition a more energy-efficient model.
But there’s bad news too. Enterprise IT consumption is going in the wrong direction: increasing by up to 1.8 per cent per year. That’s 10-30 per cent more emissions annually. Cloud platforms bear some responsibility for this, as it’s very easy to scale up technology use in the cloud. Engineers can make decisions knowing that there’s infinite scalability.
Clearly, rising consumption is a trend we need to reverse. But too few organisations are seriously monitoring the sustainability of their IT infrastructures. As a result, many of them are below par.