With more and more organisations seeking to reduce their carbon footprint, cloud computing has emerged as a simple strategy to not only live up to sustainability commitments by consolidating technology operations in shared facilities, but also accelerating business through speedy and flexible infrastructure. Many businesses may find it difficult to incorporate sustainability into their business model, but data, applications and infrastructure hosted in the cloud offers a simple, cost-effective way of investing in energy-efficient solutions without making significant changes to the way a business functions or investing in expensive equipment.
Business sustainability and green power
How hybrid and multi cloud computing helps
More than just green power
HPE GreenLake: Technology, your way
Let’s be transparent here: sustainability sounds simple on paper but can often be difficult to implement effectively in a business context. Most organisations care greatly about preserving the environment, but they also have a responsibility towards their workers, shareholders, and community to continue being successful by providing high-quality products, services, and jobs.
While there are many ways to reduce an organisation’s carbon footprint such as implementing a hybrid workspace, managing provisioning better, and turning to green power will come at a cost both financially and operationally.
The most popular way to reduce organisational carbon footprint is to turn to green power to fulfil energy needs. Solar energy, wind energy, and other similar solutions represent significant investments that eventually pay off in energy cost savings and power independence in the long term. Pairing such investments with other green initiatives and partnerships is a great first step.
Cloud providers all around the world are leading the way to going green by using less power and sometimes also turning to green power at scale. For IT businesses, the cloud is an often-overlooked method of going green without sacrificing any operational benefits. Many businesses only focus on the technical and cost-related aspects of cloud adoption rather than considering its green potential, thus shifting their focus to other less-effective initiatives. In fact, cloud computing offers many more benefits we’ll discuss later.
Hybrid and Multi Cloud infrastructure helps promote business sustainability and green power by:
According to the IDC’s Worldwide CO2 Emissions Savings from Cloud Computing Forecast, the growing adoption of ‘smarter’ sustainability practices in organisations and data centres by 2024 would save more than 1 billion metric tons of emissions. That represents 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions reduced by simply turning to the cloud.
Going green with cloud computing delivers more benefits than just saving the planet through a reduced carbon footprint. Provisioning, data backup, and maintenance are all challenges accepted as necessary with on-site IT infrastructure, but the cloud offers a solution to these challenges, providing businesses with increased agility, scalability, cost-efficiency, and accessibility to cutting-edge technologies.
Finding the right balance of IT infrastructure has long been a headache for organisations that need the space to grow but don’t want to waste resources. A study by 451 Research in 2019 showed that enterprises overprovision on IT infrastructure by 40-50% on average. This catch-22 of too much or too little often prevents IT service providers from fulfilling customers’ unpredictable IT requirements just right.
Hybrid Cloud computing mitigates this issue by providing flexible access to compute and storage resources as they’re needed. Organisations can easily scale up or down as their business evolves with cloud providers such as HPE GreenLake, only paying per use to free up capital.
Another benefit of hybrid cloud computing is removing the need for server maintenance. Infrastructure is stored in data centres with multiple contingencies and 24/7 experts at hand to respond to issues. Data backup and recovery are made simple with the redundancy provided, even when infrastructure needs to be upgraded.
Organisations need guaranteed, flexible access to the right level of provisioning for whatever their current and future needs might be. They also require a cloud service provider that understands their imperative for data security and expert support. This is where HPE GreenLake can give your business a competitive edge. With its pay-per-use model, HPE GreenLake frees up capital and provides flexibility to ramp usage up and down within minutes through a consumption-based IT model, all while keeping your software and data secure.
HPE GreenLake’s proven benefits include:
HPE GreenLake delivers everything as a service, bringing a modern cloud experience to your apps, data, and workloads, with self-service management, pay-per-use costs, and the freedom to scale up and down on demand. This robust platform drives flexibility and speed to market for your service provider business, freeing your IT staff to focus on work that adds value to your bottom line.
Find out more about HPE GreenLake and support your business and customers with complete agility and green power.