Moving compute workloads to cloud can help improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprint: Report

Moving compute workloads from on-premise data centres to the cloud can improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint by nearly 80 per cent for companies in India, a report said on Wednesday.

The report by 451 Research, commissioned by AWS, surveyed 515 organisations with annual revenues between USD 10 million and USD 1 billion across Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. This included over 100 respondents from India.

According to the report, the data centre market in India is expected to have the highest growth among the APAC markets surveyed throughout the forecast period (2019-2024). As the data centre activity continues to surge, energy consumption will also increase and that will make energy efficiency a focus for enterprises, public sector users and data centre providers.

''The server-level efficiencies of Indian organisations exceeded their peers in other surveyed APAC countries as a result of higher rates of virtualisation and a more aggressive stance towards workload consolidation. Indian organisations drive their systems somewhat harder, and their server infrastructure is among the youngest on average in APAC,'' Kelly Morgan, Research Director (Datacenter Infrastructure and Services) at 451 Research of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said.

Much of this, however, is offset by inefficiencies at the facility level, she added. Morgan noted that cloud providers like AWS are driven to make all parts of their infrastructure work in sync to increase efficiency, from design to operations, to lower costs and provide IT services at scale. Also, the lack of accessible and affordable corporate renewable energy options leaves a significant amount of carbon reduction potential on the table, she said.

Due to India's coal-heavy electricity generation, moving the workload equivalent of one MW of IT data centre capacity to the cloud would yield a massive carbon reduction of 3,449 metric tonnes per year on average, as per the report.

If cloud providers were able to provide services powered by 100 per cent renewables, a total of 4,235 metric tonnes of CO2e (Carbon dioxide equivalent) emission could be avoided by running the same enterprise and public sector workloads in the cloud, it noted. This is equivalent to annual carbon emissions from more than 900 cars.

451 Research (a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence) found that cloud-based data centres have better utilisation rates and offer further potential energy savings of more than 11 per cent due to their highly energy-efficient power and cooling systems. In a blog, AWS cited an example that if 25 per cent of the 1,200 largest publicly-traded businesses in India put one megawatt (MW) of compute workload - which is a quarter of an average enterprise IT workload - into a cloud-powered entirely by renewable energy, it would save the equivalent of a year's worth of emissions from 1,60,000 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,” AWS Head of Energy Policy (the Asia Pacific and Japan) Ken Haig said.

He added that AWS' scale and focus on innovation allow it to improve the efficiency of its data centre operations faster than traditional enterprises. ''Apart from maximising the efficiency of our operations to reduce the amount of energy needed to power our data centres, we're also working towards procuring 100 per cent renewable energy for our worldwide energy needs by 2030 and are on a path to reach that milestone early by 2025,'' Haig said.

APAC energy markets remain among the most challenging in the world for businesses seeking to source 100 per cent renewable energy, but AWS continues to collaborate with private and public organisations to overcome these barriers and invest in more projects in the region, he added.

''At Amazon, we are committed to building a sustainable business for customers and the planet, which is why we co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019, a commitment to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement,'' Haig further said.

By investing in renewable power and ensuring our facilities and operations are energy efficient, customers can be provided with the computing power they need to solve innovative challenges while reducing their overall impact on the environment and meeting their sustainability ambitions, he added.