4 Reasons Why Cloud Computing is Also a Green Solution
August 1, 2011 No CommentsCloud computing has arrived, big time. Forrester estimates that worldwide spending on public cloud computing services will grow from $25.5 billion in 2011 to $160 billion in 2020, a 22 percent annual growth rate. Businesses are increasingly substituting cloud-based for internal resources to capture benefits like faster scale-up/scale-down of capacity, pay-as-you-go pricing, and access to cloud-based applications and services without buying and managing on-premises infrastructure.
But we’ve heard little so far about the efficiency and green attributes of cloud computing. That is starting to change as we hear from cloud or as-a-service providers about the architecture and power sources behind their cloud infrastructure, and as we all start to analyze customer implementations of cloud resources vs. on-premises alternatives.
Cloud infrastructure addresses two critical elements of a green IT approach: energy efficiency and resource efficiency. Whether done in a private or public cloud configuration, as-a-service computing will be greener for (at least) the following three reasons.