Digitalization has revolutionized the business landscape and, more broadly, our daily lives. The shift towards data-driven business models and the digitalization of any private services have exponentially increased the demand for IT resources, including computing power, storage, and connectivity. This surge continues to drive innovation, necessitating that IT infrastructures become more efficient, scalable, and capable of supporting ever-growing demands while prioritizing energy efficiency and, in a broader sense, sustainability.
Data Centers Consume 50 Times More Energy than Commercial Buildings
Sustainability is becoming increasingly central for businesses, which are called upon to contribute to challenges such as global warming, depletion of natural resources and environmental pollution.
Their response cannot be merely complying with existing regulations, it must also involve concrete commitments to reducing CO2 emissions and adopting eco-sustainable practices through dedicated policies, actions, initiatives, and projects. Sustainability has become a key element of corporate governance and must be integrated into operational and strategic decisions to meet the growing expectations of consumers and investors.
Why all this focus on the IT sector? The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) states that data centers use 2% of the world’s available energy. Analysts predict this will reach 12% by 2040, making the sector even more crucial in managing energy resources and mitigating environmental impact.
On average, a data center consumes 50 times the energy of a commercial building (U.S. Department of Energy) and 1.7 million liters of water per day for cooling; additionally, e-waste (electronic waste) management and land use are significant issues due to the growth of infrastructures supporting an increasingly digital world. Therefore, it is natural to focus on IT when discussing sustainability, leading to the concept of cloud sustainability.
The Success of the Cloud Requires a Focus on Sustainability
The cloud is the primary enabler of digital transformation. Despite being discussed for over a decade, spending on cloud services continues to grow (+19% in Italy in 2023, according to the Osservatorio PoliMI), with all companies adopting it to varying degrees, expectations, and commitments; there is a significant difference between using a SaaS service for internal collaboration and migrating core business processes to a hybrid multicloud architecture, which involves the coordinated and centralized use of multiple resources and providers.
Given its global prevalence and growth prospects, addressing cloud sustainability is crucial to ensure that the digital benefits (such as reduced paper use and automation) are not offset by an increase in data center consumption.
The cloud must offer companies a more sustainable model compared to traditional on-premise paradigms, creating a win-win situation where its native characteristics of efficiency, scalability, and flexibility are combined with maximum attention to energy consumption and broader environmental sustainability aspects.
The "Natively Green" Features of the Cloud
In the ongoing debate between cloud and on-premise, the former offers several native features, inherent in its architecture, that align well with companies' sustainability needs. Additionally, cloud providers implement specific initiatives, both at the process and technology levels, to further enhance the environmental benefits of their offerings. Key features include virtualization, multi-tenancy and scalability.
1. Virtualization
The cloud relies on virtualization, which allows for consolidating and aggregating multiple workloads on the same physical server, optimizing resource use and energy consumption. According to IDC, moving from on-premise to cloud prevents the emission of 1 billion metric tons of CO2 over four years due to the efficiency of aggregated computing resources.
2. Multi-tenancy
In the public cloud, multi-tenancy enables efficient sharing of physical resources among multiple users, companies, and applications. Enabled by virtualization, this significantly impacts the energy efficiency of the infrastructure.
3. Scalability
Thanks to an advanced technological substrate, the cloud is inherently scalable. IT resources can be quickly added or removed based on actual business needs, ensuring adequate IT capacity without resource wastage. This is a significant advancement over traditional IT models, where overprovisioning was the standard solution to potential demand peaks.
Cloud Sustainability and Major Providers' Initiatives
Despite various cloud types, the most widespread model (public cloud) involves consuming services delivered via data centers owned and managed by cloud providers. This model places significant pressure on providers regarding the environmental impact of their infrastructures, to which they respond with dedicated initiatives, processes and technologies.
Major public cloud providers constantly invest in R&D to find solutions optimizing their data centers' energy efficiency. Starting from design, often inspired by Green Data Center concepts and including eco-friendly materials, construction near renewable energy sources, modular environment design, free cooling techniques (natural cooling using outside air), and heat recovery, where heat generated by IT equipment is used to warm adjacent buildings, water, or industrial processes.
Hyperscalers power their infrastructure assets using exclusively or predominantly renewable energies. For example, Amazon achieved 90% renewable energy consumption in 2022 and aims for 100% by 2025. Additionally, hyperscalers use optimized hardware and develop the software that powers their cloud platforms, introducing the concept of Green Coding: sustainable software development practices designed to optimize applications' energy efficiency and extend the hardware lifespan. Key elements include algorithm optimization, minimizing background processes, and automatically shutting down unused services.
Cooling environments is also crucial and energy-intensive. Hyperscalers like Google use a combination of air, water, or refrigerant cooling techniques based on local conditions. Given that water is one of the most efficient cooling methods, they use regeneration and treatment techniques and aim to use non-potable water, wastewater, industrial water, or even seawater as much as possible.
By adopting cloud instead of traditional on-premise implementations, companies are certainly on the right path towards sustainability. The cloud's energy efficiency, providers' initiatives, and inherent architectural characteristics translate into an efficient IT model capable of responsibly supporting digitalization, which remains a cornerstone of economic growth at all levels.
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