Cloud Computing Solutions For Sustainability: Achieve Net-Zero
Many firms believe that achieving a higher social and environmental purpose is the right and moral thing to do. According to Salesforce, the business of business is to make the world a better place. By saving energy costs, any organization can become healthier while helping to limit climate change and contribute to society as a whole.
In addition to energy savings and being socially responsible, green business solutions help maximize profits for shareholders.
- Has your organization experienced COVID-related IT service slowdown or service interruption?
- Are you burning your budgets on legacy systems management and maintenance?
If yes, it’s time to revamp your organizational strategy with a cloud computing infrastructure that ensures uninterrupted service and budget savings. Since the onset of the COVID-19, companies have been looking for various ways to use cloud computing technologies to manage their business excellence and performance while minimizing their operational costs with limited resources.
Meanwhile, legacy applications remain the biggest hurdles for business growth in security, maintenance, scalability, and lack of real-time information. Despite this, many businesses still spend their IT budgets on legacy systems, which can be costly despite adding minimal business value.
IT departments are also a major cost center for many companies. Since they require air conditioners, backup power systems, and round-the-clock maintenance, they consume more energy than any other department in your organization, which can produce a detrimental environmental impact.
What are the top 5 challenges with data center management?
Technological advancements continuously challenge the data center industry to stay up with and meet evolving customer needs. Datacenter managers and IT teams struggle to maintain high uptime, protect from vulnerabilities, and deploy at scale.
Let’s look at the top challenges faced by data center managers.
1. Real-time monitoring and reporting:
Downtimes and disruptions are inevitable. In data centers, there are applications, network connections, cables, power systems, and much more running all at the same time. Therefore, monitoring every operation in real-time is challenging, and troubleshooting will take time.
2. Capacity planning and management:
It is one of the major challenges with data center management. As your business grows, you need to process large chunks of existing and historical data for process efficiency. This further impacts planning and requires the purchase of new storage space as needed. On the other hand, unused data center space and resources will remain idle and still consume energy.
3. Uptime and performance maintenance:
Traditional data center management requires extensive manual power to monitor performance and ensure high uptime. Any interruption in the power supply and cooling accuracy affects overall business operations.
Even a second of downtime or latency issues with a business server could lead to a loss of a million dollars.
4. Energy efficiency and cost-cutting:
Energy consumption and rising temperatures are the biggest problems with on-premise data centers. As traditional data centers lack proper energy management and control tools, more energy is usually wasted at data centers than is actually used.
5. Employee productivity:
Downtimes and disruptions can frustrate and put pressure on your employees. Manual monitoring and a lack of automation tools mean your employee productivity will deteriorate (and your business performance along with it).
What is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)? : A Step Towards Green Cloud Computing
Businesses used to invest a lot in purchasing computers, storage servers, and networking infrastructure. With the emergence of cloud solutions like AWS, companies have started migrating their computation onto the cloud.
As your business grows, it requires infrastructure that can scale with your needs. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure — servers, virtual machines (VM), storage, networks, and operating systems from a cloud solutions provider on a subscription model.
IaaS gives you the best flexibility in choosing the IT for your business needs. You can pause and resume services at any given time without causing budget issues.
For example, if you are an eCommerce business and process real-time customer data, you need extra space for data processing and storage. Therefore opting for IaaS solutions allows you to get access to the server storage without an upfront investment.
Check out the top reasons why the need for hybrid cloud computing is growing in 2022 and beyond.
How to solve data center management challenges? Top 4 reasons why cloud solutions are environmentally friendly
Sustainability is in demand, with calls for green business initiatives radiating from every corner of the globe. For this reason, companies are spearheading efforts to embrace green cloud computing infrastructures that significantly reduce the use of legacy applications, and in turn, their carbon footprint.
Green cloud computing solutions help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, potentially preventing more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from 2021 through 2024, according to a forecast from International Data Corp.
Here are the top 4 reasons why cloud computing infrastructure is the future for green IT solutions.
1. Resource and energy optimization:
In a nutshell, cloud computing is a modern infrastructure strategy where multiple applications run on a single server accessed through the internet, allowing businesses to reduce the necessity of upfront investments.
With server virtualization, you can reduce local server installation space, use less equipment to run applications, and have less electricity requirement than traditional data centers. By doing so, you can eventually reduce your carbon footprint and e-waste.
2. Higher utilization rate:
What if you have invested a ton in infrastructure procurement and installation and kept it idle for too long? Would it yield any results and add value to your business? Certainly not.
This is the case with traditional business models. Companies invest upfront in the wake of future scalability and keep their infrastructure underutilization while paying hefty electrical bills. Conversely, the cloud computing infrastructure allows companies to utilize the server space on an on-demand basis, ensuring higher utilization of resources with reduced energy consumption.
Compared to the traditional business model, cloud architecture solutions are scalable and cost-effective.
44% of CEOs in the United Nations Global Compact — Accenture Strategy CEO Study on Sustainability see a net-zero future for their company in the next 10 years.
3. Easy replacement of hardware:
Amid evolving business needs, your data center’s hardware must be adaptable to upgrades or replacements whenever required. But would it be possible to change the hardware infrastructure more often? Not at all. Changing the hardware infrastructure has a cumulative impact on time, cost, and resources. On the other hand, hardware maintenance is cost-sensitive and needs continuous monitoring.
On the other hand, modern cloud infrastructure solutions allow you to bring down the costs associated with energy consumption and maintenance. Since the cloud computing solutions provider is responsible for timely maintenance and upgrades, you can expect high uptime while reducing your carbon footprints.
4. Reduction in climate impact:
As said earlier, according to Salesforce, the business of any business is to make the world a better place. Thus, by embracing cloud computing infrastructure for your business, you can considerably reduce carbon emissions and eventually contribute to a sustainable future.
Between 2013–2019, companies with consistently high environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance enjoyed 4.7x higher operating margins and lower volatility than low ESG performers over the same period. [Accenture]
Conclusion:
We are familiar with the “there is no planet B” quote.
With the rapid adoption of technology, companies have been trying to achieve sustainable business solutions to remain competitive and to scale. In 2022 and beyond, relying on traditional business models will leave businesses in a void.
Are infrastructure maintenance and unnecessary consumption burning a hole in your pocket? If yes, it’s the right time to embrace cloud computing infrastructure solutions that can slash your carbon footprint and make your business greener.
Amzur Technologies has been in the cloud computing industry for more than 15 years in Tampa, Florida, USA. We have proven expertise in transforming the cloud journey of startups and SMBs in achieving their green business goals. Our AWS cloud architects help businesses across various industries including, real estate, education, recruitment, and renewable energy.
What are your plans in 2022 to make your business sustainable and socially responsible?
Are you looking for any cloud migration solutions provider? Amzur is happy to help and collaborate with you to make the planet a better place.
