Cloud is not a carbon-free ride (Guest blog from TCS)

Author: Verity Greig, Cloud Evangelist, TCS

Through migrating to Cloud, you can immediately benefit from highly efficient datacenters, but seismic gains can also be made through operational changes once you’re there. Two key principles for reducing your emissions in the cloud are improving efficiency and reducing digital waste.

Improve Efficiency

Region Choices

Cloud datacenters are spread across the planet and powered using different energy sources. Making informed decisions around where to deploy your workloads can significantly impact the emissions your solutions produce.

Platform Modernisation

• Consider options for containerising workloads for deploying application components with more granularity
• Evaluate moving to serverless workloads to avoid idle resources
• Build cloud-native apps allowing the platform to handle scaling, availability, and performance.

Software Development

Building “green” software involves improving efficiencies across the development process, deployment, usage, and maintenance.  Organisations can incorporate reusable components to reduce the application development time.

Doing a customer-journey analysis to look at various paths taken by a customer and optimizing individual paths is a good starting point for carbon-footprint reduction.

Remove waste from the system

Cost optimisation can be used as a proxy for a sustainable cloud environment

Reducing unnecessary spending lowers the number of excessive emissions from deployed workloads.  For example, using spot VMs, otherwise wasted capacity—at significantly reduced prices—contributes to a more sustainable platform design.

TCS Credentials

TCS walks the sustainability talk: As a purpose-led services business, TCS sees environmental stewardship as core to its sustainability strategy. Its vision is to decouple business growth and ecological footprint from its operations to address the environmental bottom line. TCS now targets net-zero emissions by 2030. The green approach is embedded in our internal processes and our services offerings.

Verity Greig Cloud Evangelist, TCS "I’m a Leader who believes that technology can be a force for good. As a Cloud Evangelist, I have the privilege of leading TCS' cloud strategy for the UK. Recently TCS was named in the World’s Most Admired Companies List by FORTUNE® Magazine"

 techUK – Committed to Climate Action

By 2030, digital technology can cut global emissions by 15%. Cloud computing, 5G, AI and IoT have the potential to support dramatic reductions in carbon emissions in sectors such as transport, agriculture, and manufacturing. techUK is working to foster the right policy framework and leadership so we can all play our part. For more information on how techUK can support you, please visit our Climate Action Hub and click ‘contact us’.