How companies save energy with the cloud 

By 2025, worldwide data volumes are expected to rise to 163 zetabytes, that is, 163 billion terabytes, a tenfold increase over the 2016 figure. This is the forecast made by the IDC market research institute in a white paper entitled “Data age 2025.” Although private users still account for the majority of generated data volumes, industries such as those engaged in robotics, deep learning or topics like big data and IoT are ensuring that data is increasingly being accumulated in the corporate sector. According to analysts, companies will hold almost 60% of all the stored data by as early as 2025. This data growth will also cause power consumption to skyrocket: according to the Swedish researcher Andres Andrae, this “data tsunami” will result in data centres accounting for 4.5% of global electricity consumption by 2025. In Switzerland, server rooms and data centres already account for about 3% of domestic electricity consumption.

Nevertheless, professional data centres in particular, in which companies access IT resources via hosting and the cloud, are still energy-efficient – especially when compared to in-house servers. Thanks to continuously improving construction approaches and increasingly efficient architecture, large numbers of servers are being operated at data centres – simultaneously and under optimum conditions. Server virtualization enables companies to share resources such as computing power and storage. “Data centres help companies benefit from economies of scale,” explains Rudolf Anker, Swisscom’s Project Manager New Data Centres. “Customers share existing resources and thus also the electricity and maintenance costs. Because the filling degree of the individual servers is also very high, hosting at data centres is not only economically interesting for companies, but also ecologically.”

Thanks to cloud computing, IT resources have even become elastic: customers simply add them with a click of a mouse as and when required. They only pay for what they actually use. Microsoft proves that cloud services also provide especially high energy efficiency: according to the Microsoft Carbon Study 2018, when companies switch from a traditional data centre to the Microsoft cloud, they improve their energy efficiency by 22-93% depending on how they use it. IT operational efficiency certainly contributes to this. But factors such as the architecture of the IT system, the data centre infrastructure and the use and provision of renewable energy also promote sustainability.