Sustainability in the Cloud — 5 Best Practises to do it right

Sustainability in IT became an important topic last years, since every economic sector tries to make its contribution to the environment protection and reduce its own impact on it. And IT is one of the best sectors, since it has already very efficient and ready-to-use tools, which just need to be taken and applied.

Moving from the traditional data center to the cloud saves more than 75% in CO2

Why cloud and sustainability?

This is just one of many good reasons. We as Thinkport encourage clients to migrate to the cloud and use serverless services which sufficiently decrease the carbon footprint due to maximizing operating efficiency of cloud providers as applications need less infrastructure, physical space and energy.
A sustainable cloud not only reduces cost, but is efficient, improves a companies branding and supports a sustainable future for company and world.
As cloud providers are responsible for sustainability of the cloud, customers are responsible in the cloud. Thinkport supports customers with this step by selecting an efficient programming language, efficient data storage techniques and deploying correctly sized and efficient infrastructure.

We also follow tagging strategies to keep control over infrastructure and regularly cleans up idle (inoperative) and unnecessary resources. If possible, and meets the requirements, we advocate our clients to use the Ireland region (EU) for computationally intensive workloads supported by renewable energy sources from AWS wind farms.

A fundamental principle is to use as less resources as possible but using the given ones to its full capacity. E.g. „Pay as you go“ — the cloud pricing model. It helps reducing unused storage resources while you only pay for the individual services you need. While AWS constructs server and purchases energy, the physical server capacity relies on the customer. But using the managed services can help minimize your impact, such as automatically moving infrequently accessed data to cold storage with Amazon S3 Lifecycle configurations or Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to adjust capacity to meet demand

As a modest contribution to the topic, except of our Cloud expertise, we also switched to electric company cars.

The issue of sustainability in IT is — and will be — high on the agenda for companies. The demand for computing power and associated energy consumption are constantly increasing. A move to the cloud means a more efficient, demand-driven us of IT resources, savings in hardware and the use of energy-efficient data centers from hyperscalers. Thus, companies get support to set their focus on combining corporate and economic goals, intending reduced operational cost while conserving natural resources including water and energy. Just migrating from on-premise to cloud decreases the pollution of carbon dioxide by 60–80%. Choosing the right location and geography matters and due to more effectively utilization and a modern server structure of the cloud, an average of 65% of energy is saved by German companies, as well as 13,5% by choosing a sufficient data center.

What you can do

Creating the sustainable future with us and check your individual carbon emission saving potential here: https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/sustainability/sustainability/free-trial/

Moreover, consider following additional advice for your further development in the cloud:

• Follow on-demand practices to avoid idle servers
• Optimize your architecture and computational algorithms
• Use only as much infrastructure as you really need, maximizing utilization
• Regularly reconsider usage of existing architectures, software and hardware and update to increase the efficiency