Going green: sustainability insights every business should consider

Long gone is the requirement to house inefficient and costly IT equipment on-premise. For years now, the benefits of moving to the cloud have been focused around scalability, cost efficiency, and risk mitigation, but as sustainability becomes a core concern for cloud providers, new benefits of cloud migration are taking center stage.

Carbon Reduction

Moving from on-prem to the cloud has the potential to reduce the carbon impact of a firm's IT operations from between 80% and 98%. On the lower end of this spectrum are lift and shifts, which can result in an average carbon reduction of around 80%. Investing heavily in the cloud, including the development of cloud-native applications, can reduce carbon impact by up to 98%.

This percentage depends on multiple factors, including the cloud provider's commitment to sustainability/efficiency as well as the method of delivery; incorporating sustainable coding and design principles can further increase the carbon efficiency of digital operations.

Waste Reduction

Cloud providers that are deeply committed to sustainability are investing heavily in circular design for their cloud infrastructure. These providers are designing servers with recyclable, modular components that reduce the waste produced as equipment ages or malfunctions. Instead of full server replacement, single components can now be retired, recycled, and replaced, reducing the physical waste impact of cloud operations.

Mission Advancement

As sustainability becomes a core component of mission and purpose for an increasing number of firms, choosing a cloud partner with sustainability at the center can be a further display of commitment to this mission/purpose. This can also play a role in mitigating the reputational risk that climate change presents.