Cloud Storage : Boon or Bane?

We are being enveloped in the ONLINE World and its carbon footprints are dramatically expanding as its energy consumption rises to meet growing demand. Greenpeace estimates that by 2025, through the technological expansion of cloud computing, and artificial intelligence - energy consumption will increase from 7% - to 20% of the world’s total electricity. It is projected that annual data traffic will increase by 60% to 175 Zettabytes (175 trillion Gigabytes). Companies like Microsoft have stated that the growth of cloud storage has had a minimal impact on energy consumption and further efficiency improvements will negate the impact of ever-expanding storage and processing. But is this the case?

Cloud computing is a technology that employs the Internet for storing and managing data on remote servers. The same data is then accessed via the internet. This data can be collected, analyzed, and stored. Data can also be shared in data centers all across the globe before being accessed through a plethora of web-enabled services. With cloud computing, there are multiple benefits for businesses like cost reduction and business user convenience.

Cloud Computing uses minimal energy usage, reduces carbon emissions, and helps in dematerialization, but the user traffic is increasing beyond imagination. By the end of 2021, 67% of all enterprise infrastructure was cloud-based. Amazon web services lead the cloud computing market share at 32%. In 2020, 81% of organizations had at least one application running on the cloud. In 2018 it was projected that 3.6 billion people were accessing a large range of cloud computing services offered by Google Drive, Office365, Oracle, Netflix, and Dropbox. The largest players in the cloud computing field are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The main downside of cloud computing is the vast amounts of electricity required to power the servers and maintain an optimum temperature.  The IT sector alone has more electricity than all of Russia and about half the total consumption of the US. The upcoming decade will see continued growth in demand for massive data storage and processing capacity. It is unclear whether demand exceeds the energy efficiency, and whether the energy footprint of data centers will grow or stabilize.

Many companies are using renewable energies to meet the energy demand and neutralize carbon emissions. Investing in next-generation energy-efficient storage and cooling technologies to cater to the expected growth in demand will be crucial. In the future, all the energy demand will be supplied by Sustainable & Clean energy such as Renewables. It is essential to build the largest renewable plants, energy supply, and distribution grids, and the distributors should give as much importance to renewables as traditional energy supply. 

Every individual or group house, industry, and organization should own at least one renewable energy source to meet their energy needs, and We at ENPOSS support every individual and industry with the energy-saving device “FORCE” which supports both traditional & renewable energy sources and saves your energy bills.