Sustainable cloud conversation continues with Accenture report

9 Nov 2020 01:36 PM

Companies have historically driven financial, security, and agility benefits through cloud, but sustainability is becoming an imperative.

Accenture's new report, ‘The green behind the cloud’ explores how cloud migration approaches can be built with sustainability in mind.

By pursuing a green approach, Accenture analysis suggests migrations to the public cloud can reduce global carbon (CO2) emissions by 59 million tons of CO2 per year. This represents a 5.9% reduction in total IT emissions and equates to taking 22 million cars off the road.

The report then designs three ambition levels to sustainable cloud: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) migrations without major redesign, Sustainable Software engineering practices and application optimisation for cloud. 

Cloud sustainability is an important issue at techUK, which had been explored at the end of 2019 in the discussion paper Attributing Carbon to Cloud. This explores how we can go about attributing carbon to the activity we outsource to third party data centres and providers. In 2020, we continued to advocate the need for greater transparency in attributing carbon to cloud services and in the online webinar: How do we build a sustainable cloud?

Accenture's report continues to advoacte for greening of cloud services by exploring how companies can innovate further with cloud sustainability still at the forefront of design. The report states that cloud migrations can also unlock new opportunities like clean energy transitions enabled by cloud-based geographic analyses, material waste reductions from better data insights, and targeted medical R&D as a result of faster analytics platforms.

You can read Accenture's full report here.