R ather than using local storage units and requiring employees to work on site, most companies have turned to the cloud: a network of remote servers that can be accessed over the internet. It’s a shared infrastructure that, as of now, is thought to be a more sustainable option than traditional means of storage. But how much of that notion is based in reality versus wishful thinking? FEED set out to find out. Sustainable storage The cloud offers a number of benefits on-site storage doesn’t: scalability, flexibility and, above all, a shared infrastructure. “Instead of organisations running underutilised servers in isolation, cloud platforms pool compute and storage across many users,” says Lee Otterway, commercial director at Dot Group. “This allows systems to run closer to capacity and scale resources up or down as demand changes, reducing the over-provisioning that often occurs in fixed environments.” “In media and entertainment, archive environments are often designed for peak demand rather than everyday use,” adds Brian Campanotti, digital transformation
Idle instances, inefficient workloads or unnecessary data movement can still create waste.” Whether the cloud is efficient depends on how the data centres are run. “Simply moving workloads to the cloud isn’t enough,” argues Campanotti. So, what can we do? Carbon footprint: Querying the standard Companies can monitor and manage energy consumption, particularly as it relates to the cloud, by measuring their carbon footprint – or, at least, that has become the commonly accepted metric. Around 2014, academics at Bristol University were studying the energy impact of the cloud, linking gigabytes of data with kilograms of carbon. “That had taken off as the way to measure sustainability: the carbon impact of digital services,” explains Dom Robinson, chief business development officer at
visionary at Cloudfirst.io. “Rather than running continuously, a shared model can reduce the amount of idle infrastructure required to support large archives.” In theory, the cloud reduces wasted energy, instead optimising cooling, efficiency and the overall consumption. “Cloud providers,” Campanotti believes, “are investing heavily in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure.” (More on that later.) Amazon Web Services, for example, hopes to hit net-zero carbon by 2040, and research by Accenture indicates that AWS’s infrastructure is around four times more efficient than private data centres. “That said,” Otterway clarifies, “the cloud isn’t automatically sustainable.
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