How the cloud helps companies reduce their environmental impact

Artificial intelligence puts greater pressure on the storage and processing needs of organizations, demanding more energy consumption. But the migration of these workloads to the cloud could represent efficiencies of up to four times compared to the traditional on-premise model, according to a recent AWS study.

Technology company Whitestack estimates that just by moving workloads to the cloud – even if it remains within a private environment – energy consumption can be reduced by 50% thanks to the sharing of servers.

The AWS study, conducted by consulting firm Accenture, also states that when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by 99%.

“Efficiency is among the most important things for the vast majority of our customers,” Chris Walker, head of sustainability at AWS, told BNamericas. “50% of my time is working directly with clients to show them what we’re doing on our side to be more efficient and reduce our carbon footprint.”

Faced with growing demand, AWS is committed to reducing its carbon footprint through the use of renewable energy. “We’re the corporation that purchases the most renewable energy year after year,” Walker said.

Last year, AWS matched 100% of the energy consumed in all its operations globally with renewable energy, a goal that the company had only set for 2030.

Walker says that from the land purchased for operations, the engineering of the buildings and the chips, everything is designed to be as efficient as possible. The high-performance Graviton chip achieved a 30% improvement in computing performance and 70% more memory than current processors.

The company has three availability zones in Brazil and has projects to develop new datacenters in Santiago, Chile. In addition, it has deployed cloud zones in several countries in the region.

In Brazil, 90% of electricity production comes from a mix of neutral and low carbon. This limits the opportunity to continue reducing through energy acquisition. Still, migrating workloads to AWS can reduce associated emissions by around 65%, according to the report.

Organizations can achieve an additional 45% reduction with a modern AWS architecture. In this way, running storage applications on AWS could reduce carbon emissions by 81% compared to local infrastructures.

PRIVATE CLOUD

Whitestack says that simply incorporating cloud tools in private datacenters and using state-of-the-art hardware allows companies to significantly optimize energy consumption by sharing servers for different applications.

José Miguel Guzmán, co-founder of Whitestack, told BNamericas that his solution offers 10 times more computing capacity than traditional ones. “This means tremendous savings in energy and carbon footprint,” he said.

The company has deployed private clouds for firms in Latin America, especially in the telecommunications sector.

“What happens to telecoms is that they already have their datacenters with a certain maximum energy capacity, they don't have more. And then more efficient systems, in addition to lowering the bill, allow adding more applications [in the same space and with the same energy],” Guzmán said.

“If you compare the technology in 2010, we currently use a quarter of the energy,” he said. In addition to reducing energy consumption, new technologies make it possible to make the use of space more efficient.