One major fact is true for many companies — the best time to start implementing green solutions is yesterday. With a massive focus on the negative impacts that humanity is having on the environment, businesses are looking for ways to turn more environmentally sustainable.

One of the major ways they’re doing this is by looking at the cloud. After all, the cloud is a newer technology that can have many benefits for your business, but it also has a lot of environmental and sustainability benefits.

In this article, we will go over the green advantages of migrating to the cloud, as well as some ways to ensure that you use the cloud to remain as environmentally sustainable as possible.

The Need for a Reduction in Carbon Emissions

To put it simply, the planet is suffering from the actions of humanity — and carbon emissions are one of the highest contributors. With billions of tons of carbon being pumped into the environment, the planet is seeing dire consequences such as the rapid onset of climate change and more volatile global weather patterns.

So, a change needs to be made. And, while it can be easy to blame the everyday consumer, a major contributor to the issue is business use. After all, the needs of businesses are much higher than the everyday consumer, and companies end up using a lot more energy to be able to function daily.

How the Cloud Reduces your Carbon Footprint

IT Operations Efficiency

Cloud computing makes your operations more efficient, meaning that less energy is used all around due to optimised resource utilisation. This is due to the dynamic scalability of the cloud platform, meaning you’ll only ever be using what you need and nothing more.

On top of this, features like automation mean that your organisation is ultimately more efficient, meaning less energy is spent all around to do basic tasks on workstations and instead can be done in the cloud without human input.

IT Equipment Efficiency

The top cloud providers in the world are currently investing heavily in sustainability, and so using their data centres means that you’re generally going to be on a more sustainable infrastructure than an on-premise ecosystem.

Moreover, cloud providers generally offer carbon footprint reporting, meaning you can easily figure out which provider is better for sustainability.

Data Centre Infrastructure

More specifically, the data centres that cloud providers use are generally designed to be as low as possible in energy consumption.

With investment in state-of-the-art design and layout, and innovations to some of the major issues such as cooling, cloud providers are making sustainability far more accessible for companies worldwide.

Renewable Energy

Cloud providers are also looking towards renewable sources of energy to power their data centres. This includes energy such as wind energy and solar energy, and decreasing their reliance on carbon and other fossil fuels all around.

Sustainable Business Practices Enabled by Cloud Solutions

Unified Data Intelligence

Unified Data Intelligence (UDI) is a key part of enhancing sustainability. By harnessing and analysing a vast amount of data, UDI can help you optimise your resource allocation and reduce waste all around, helping you drive more sustainable practices.

Here are some of the ways that UDI can help you become more sustainable in practice —

  • Resource Optimisation: UDI can accurately forecast demand for resources, meaning you can prepare for optimisation and reduce waste.
  • Supply Chain: UDI can identify bottlenecks and optimise routes in your supply chain, giving you the information to start minimising emissions as much as possible.
  • Carbon Footprint Analysis: UDI can undertake a carbon footprint analysis to help you find the most critical areas to improve on.

Sustainable IT Infrastructure

Making sure that your IT infrastructure is set up to bolster sustainability is vital to making sure your business remains sustainable. After all, using infrastructure that isn’t suitable for sustainability will mean that you end up using way more energy than intended.

Ensuring that your IT infrastructure is sustainable includes —

  • Hardware: Selecting hardware that is energy efficient will mean less energy will be used all around.
  • Power Management: Power management will let you reduce idle power consumption.
  • Virtualisation: Consolidating multiple workloads onto fewer servers will improve utilisation rates, saving energy.

Reduce Environmental Impact of Operations

Being conscious of the environmental impact of your operations is vital. By taking advantage of the cloud’s ability to use sustainable technology for operations, you can easily ensure that your company does the best it can to take steps to reduce the environmental impact of operations all around.

This includes taking steps such as reducing your hardware footprint by moving away from a physical server, to even simply just being more transparent about your carbon footprint all around.

Create Sustainable Value Chains

Just like other aspects of your business, you can create sustainable value chains using the cloud — while also improving their quality all around. By taking advantage of cloud-enabled features such as real-time visibility, route optimisation, demand forecasting, and other features, you can better ensure that you’re prepared for demand and reduce waste all-around.

On top of this, you can use cloud tools to evaluate suppliers based on sustainability, as well as use collaborative tools to be able to promote sustainability across the whole supply chain much more easily than ever.

How We Can Help

The environment is suffering due to a lack of focus on sustainability, and it’s our responsibility to mitigate the damage we’ve done to the world. As a business, you can move to the cloud and take advantage of a host of sustainability benefits, to do your bit in saving the planet — as well as taking your organisation to the next level.

If you’re looking to get started with the cloud but don’t know where to begin, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help and will be able to ensure that you have everything you need to be able to succeed with the cloud.

Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.