Caring for the environment: Green cloud computing is the new flavour

Research from Accenture has found that shifting from on-premise data centres to the public cloud can reduce an enterprise’s energy usage by 65% and cut carbon emissions by more than 84%. Migrating existing private workloads to a public cloud could reduce global CO2 emissions by nearly 60 million tonne annually—equivalent to taking 22 million gasoline-powered cars off the road.

Here’s a real-life example. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada’s national housing agency, has reduced the carbon footprint of its IT operations. CMHC has undertaken, with Accenture, a major IT transformation including a transition to the cloud that has resulted in reduction of its IT-related CO2 emissions by more than 80%.