We’re all trying to do our bit to save the environment, shorter showers, recycling more, eating less meat, car and travel shares, even going waste free with every day items from shampoo to perfumes being made in bar form.  The reality of our Earth’s future has especially kicked in recently with the striking headline stating, ‘We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe’ sending us all into a panic about changing our actions. Obviously, some things aren’t easy to change and the rise in technology may seem to hinder the chance of truly going green. Why not take a look at how the cloud can help?

What is the cloud?

The cloud is a metaphor for a global network of remote servers that operates as a single ecosystem, commonly associated with the Internet. Cloud computing gives you the ability to store data and programs online instead of in your hard drive. Making this data accessible anywhere on any device. Think of it as your own secure network.

How can the cloud be ‘green’?

A more environmentally friendly approach to tech can be considered through the use of Cloud computing. How you may ask? You are essentially able to run the same operating systems and data storage with much less hardware. Multiple operating systems can be run from one cloud server, resulting in much less equipment needed to run a workload of the same size. Using a cloud server also reduces a business or an individual’s electricity costs as there is only one physical server which is based in the cloud providers data centre. From this, there is no need to spend increasing amounts of money on the correct machinery needed to run and maintain the equipment.

As you can see, you can use so many resources through the cloud all whilst reducing your carbon footprint. But what if you don’t need everything and more? Well don’t worry, running work through the cloud allows you have the freedom to add and remove resources as you grow or want to get smaller. A pay-per-use service makes you aware of what you are consuming and lets you openly change your plan to use different or larger resources when you actually need it. Not only is this highly cost effective, it’s also energy saving.

Hosted servers and desktops also allow employees to work from anywhere. This reduces energy costs at work and most importantly, eliminates the need to travel to work. This has shown ‘cut costs by £3 billion a year for UK employers and employees and save over 3 million tonnes of carbon a year’.

Still not convinced?  Cloud computing reduces carbon emissions by almost 86 million metric tons per year by 2020. It also can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30 percent for large businesses. Small businesses can save even more energy than the larger counterparts – up to 90 percent!

What we can do.

Here at Cloudserve we offer, secure cloud computing services. We are a Microsoft Silver Partner specialising in delivering high performance, reliable, and cost-effective services to small and medium size businesses. Cloud computing services are enabling customers to access the IT services they need to run their businesses from the cloud without any infrastructure investment or any services deployed in-house. Cloudserve takes complex cloud services and makes them consumable to small and medium businesses, offering a complete array of IT and communications services.