Environmental Impact of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing & Climate Change

It is no secret that Cloud Adoption and Cloud Computing have been on the rise in the last decade. More enterprises are seeing the cost benefits in addition to the increased agility and flexibility that Cloud offers and employees are beginning to demand. But as Cloud Adoption shows no signs of slowing down, what impact does the increase of Cloud Adoption have on the environment, specifically in relation to Climate Change?

In researching this article, there seems to be little agreement on the long term effects of Cloud Computing and Climate Change. There are certainly environmental benefits to Cloud Computing, as there are major drawbacks (addressed below). Here is what we do know:

• PC ownership has quadrupled between 2007 and 2020 to 4 billion devices. Correlatively, emissions have double over the same period, with laptops overtaking desktops as the main source of global ICT emissions (22%)
• Mobile phone ownership has almost doubled to nearly 5 billion accounts, and broadband uptake has reached almost 900 million accounts over the same period, with emissions doubling over the entire telecoms infrastructure
• Data centers currently use between 1 and 4 percent of the world’s electricity; energy use and consequently emissions from the Internet is poised to surge further in the next 5 years
• A quick snapshot of the major Cloud hosting providers shows the percentages of…