How Cloud Computing is an Aid to Green IT?

The planet, Earth has faced some serious challenges in the most recent century. The causes of these problems have been various. Among them, political, economic, and financial reasons have been dominant, but recently the environmental causes are taking the center stage. The pacing up of technical development overshadowed the harms on the environment.

And now, several businesses including small, mid and big enterprises around the world have shown concern on environmental issues. Green color, being associated with nature, is given the code name for this eco-friendly movement.

No one is ready to compromise on the productivity while giving a helping hand to the Green efforts. That is precisely the dilemma facing the world today. So, the demand of the time is to look for green IT practices and solutions that can keep the performance graphs northwards without hurting the planet. Cloud computing seems quite a fitting.

Cloud computing is a modern-day computing option that can store and manage the data over a network to process different operations without requiring much of physical hardware. The service has been in use for some years now and has earned appreciation from businesses as well as individual users.

Not only it helps the businesses in controlling expenses and save time, but there are also a number of ways in which it benefits the environment:

1. Efficient Methods in Actions

Cloud computing has been smartly designed to keep the energy consumption at minimum possible levels. At the same time, the usage of resources is controlled efficiently to demand the least from nature. Energy resources consumed by data centers are extensively focused on keeping the need for natural and non-renewable resources lower.

Though, the overall energy consumption by the data center will appear very big but compared to the same amount of processes executed locally at the business headquarters it is very greatly reduced.

2. No Geographical Damages to Nature

For most cases, data centers that host the data and applications for businesses do not have any specific geographical preferences. Perhaps, the only condition to set up the data center is to avoid a disaster prone area. They can be located at any distance from the business location. So, development of a data center does not particularly require the tormenting of nature.

3. Cloud Plans Encourage Efficient Usage

Cloud services providers usually offer pay-as-you-go plan (or pay-per-use plan) for individuals as well as the businesses. Opting for these plans makes users use only the required amount of resources and hence, reduces the wastage of extra storage space and power that run applications on traditional computing means.

4. Reduced Hardware Emission

One thing that Cloud computing is certainly good at is the lesser dependency on the hardware. This factor can be counted as the biggest contribution of cloud computing for the environment. Additional expenses, time and impact on nature of manufacturing a new hardware is reduced to a great extent. Additionally, the lesser usage means the emission from hardware that has been polluting the environment is also lowered.

Data centers are the backbone of the cloud computing and are expected to turn into biggest power consumer within some years. It means that the previously employed methods of productivity are giving up for cloud computing.

Given the fact that cloud computing is, in many ways, helping nature, it is turning up as the biggest consumer is not a harm, but a positive sign. Cloud computing supports the green IT causes and a business can certainly make its contribution towards nature by adopting this technology.