New study finds migrating IT workloads to the cloud can reduce carbon emissions for Indian companies by nearly 80%

“Customers in APAC who move compute workloads to the AWS Cloud can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, benefiting from the net effect of all our sustainability efforts,” said Ken Haig, Head of Energy Policy, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS.

Indian companies and public sector organisations that migrated computing workloads from on-premises data centres to cloud infrastructure could expect to reduce their energy use—and associated carbon footprint—by nearly 80%, says Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to the Cloud for APAC report by 451 Research, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by AWS, surveyed more than 500 private and public sector organisations across Asia Pacific (APAC), spanning a variety of industries across Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. It includes over 100 survey respondents in India, and also found that cloud service providers that tap into the local renewable energy market to run their operations in India can further boost carbon emissions savings. The report estimates that if just 25% of the 1,200 largest publicly-traded businesses in India put one megawatt (MW) of compute workload into the cloud, powered by renewable energy, it would save the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from 160,000 Indian households.

“Customers in APAC who move compute workloads to the AWS Cloud can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, benefiting from the net effect of all our sustainability efforts,” said Ken Haig, Head of Energy Policy, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS. “Our scale and focus on innovation allow us to improve efficiency of our data centre operations faster than traditional enterprises.”

Puneet Chandok, president of commercial business—AWS India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL), said, “Cloud technology can credibly help companies in India decarbonise. With India’s vibrant startup ecosystem already pioneering low carbon solutions, it is imperative that enterprises, public sector organisations, and policy makers factor in sustainability as a critical part of their cloud migration decisions.”

451 Research found the energy efficiency gains of cloud data centres came from their use of the latest, most energy-efficient servers, which typically run at higher utilisation rates than on-premises data centers. These two factors combined led cloud data centres to use 67.4% less energy. The average server utilisation in APAC enterprises was just under 15%. By contrast, 451 Research shows that cloud operators utilise servers well above 50% to find the right balance between efficiency and application performance.

https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/carbon-footprint-helping-businesses-decarbonise-via-cloud-infrastructure/2308912/