by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
From the introduction to the report:
“Both cloud computing and sustainability are emerging as transformative trends in business and society. Most consumers (whether they are aware of it or not) are already heavy users of cloud-enabled services, including email, social media, online gaming, and many mobile applications. The business community has begun to embrace cloud computing as a viable option to reduce costs and to improve IT and business agility.
At the same time, sustainability continues to gain importance as a performance indicator for organizations and their IT departments. Corporate sustainability officers, regulators and other stakeholders have become increasingly focused on IT’s carbon footprint, and organizations are likewise placing more emphasis on developing long-term strategies to reduce their carbon footprint through more sustainable operations and products.
Cloud service providers are making significant investments in data center infrastructure to provide not only raw computing power but also Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business applications for their customers. New data centers are being built at ever-larger scales and with increased server density, resulting in greater energy consumption.”
Without wanting to pour water on the flames and wishing to dampen spirits it may be that companies can make savings but it is questionable as to whether those are saving throughout, that is to say as to whether the carbon footprint, which I rather refer to as environmental footprint, of the cloud data centers is not worse that that of individual held ones. In addition to that there is the question of security of data and of the issue of transferring data across borders.
I think that the jury still is out on all the cloud hype and maybe we come back to earth soon, and hopefully not with a thud of having lost data or worse. As far as I am concerned data is best held where it is used or not too far away from there.
© 2010
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