Harnessing the cloud delivers real benefits in terms of efficiency, ease of collaboration and cost-effectiveness. What many businesses don’t realize is that it can also be a greener solution than on-prem or manual processes.

By making a few intelligent decisions on your digital transformation journey, you can increase the eco-friendliness of your tech. 

1. Increase resource efficiency

How much cloud space do you waste? As per this 2020 report by Flexara, companies self-report wastage of as much as 30% of cloud space – which, like many self-reports, may well be an underestimation. Increase efficiency by reducing the amount of cloud space you purchase. The less unnecessary cloud storage you use, the more you save – on money, as well as energy consumed by your cloud computing servers.

In addition to eliminating inactive or unnecessary storage, computing costs and energy consumption can be reduced by specifying expiration dates on data stored on the cloud. Cluttering your storage with ten iterations of a minor job that was completed five years ago is not very efficient! You could also consider turning off your workloads after working hours.

2. Choose green cloud data centers

Large-scale data centers leverage economies of scale to more efficiently manage power consumption, cooling and server utilization rates. Simply moving from discrete units for each enterprise to a large data center has been a major factor in the reduction of CO2 emissions. However, many of these data centers are still using coal for power generation, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. 

In a March forecast, International Data Corporation estimated that there is potential to save 1.6 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2024, if all data centers were designed for sustainability. Indeed, with the current percentage of green cloud data centers, simply migrating to the cloud, could save 629 million metric tons in the same period.

Whenever possible, investigate the data center infrastructure you are investing in. Opt for green data centers that utilize renewable energy wherever possible.

3. Optimize product efficiency

Develop for mobile

Mobile devices are the future of internet access, so it makes good financial sense to optimize your product to suit smaller devices. It also makes good ecological sense, as smaller devices and screen sizes require less data. Responsive websites can also save energy. Faster loading time, fewer error pages presented and clearer website communication mean that users are on your website for less time to gather the information they need, thus saving battery life.

Optimize for cloud

Don’t just move your workloads to the cloud – optimize them. This doesn’t just save money by reducing network traffic, it also reduces carbon emissions. You can also minimize traffic by reducing the number and size of requests made, by using caching and by dynamically reloading only necessary components. By using caches, the data can be transferred from a local edge server to the user, thus reducing the distance travelled. 

The way to increase eco-friendliness of your tech stack is to increase sensitization to green development from top to bottom. Encourage everyone involved in cloud-related decisions to think about how they can do better. And considering green development is cost-effective too, there’s really no downside.

At CloudNow, we believe that our greatest responsibility is to our planet – and our second greatest is to our clients. Fortunately, they’re never in conflict! Do contact us for a consultation with our experts on how we can leverage green development to give you the best results. Let’s talk!