Research from Accenture has found that shifting from on-premise data centres to the public cloud can reduce an enterprise’s energy usage by 65% and cut carbon emissions by more than 84%. Migrating existing private workloads to a public cloud could reduce global CO2 emissions by nearly 60 million tonne annually—equivalent to taking 22 million gasoline-powered cars off the road.
Here’s a real-life example. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada’s national housing agency, has reduced the carbon footprint of its IT operations. CMHC has undertaken, with Accenture, a major IT transformation including a transition to the cloud that has resulted in reduction of its IT-related CO2 emissions by more than 80%.
“Every company now needs to master change at speed and scale to benefit not only shareholders and employees but also our communities and the planet,” said Kishore Durg, Senior managing director and lead, Cloud First Global Services, Accenture. “As companies accelerate cloud adoption, myNav Green Cloud Advisor can help them simultaneously address one of their most pressing challenges, which is to reduce emissions and waste with greener IT practices.”
Recently, Accenture launched Green Cloud Advisor, a new capability for the Accenture myNav platform that enables enterprises to operate more sustainable and efficient cloud environments. myNav Green Cloud Advisor helps companies design cloud solutions that reduce carbon emissions and lay a foundation for responsible innovation. First, Green Cloud Advisor establishes a baseline of existing data centre energy consumption, computing requirements and sustainability goals. It then uses proprietary algorithms to quantify the “greenness” of potential cloud solution options, based on a range of information, such as the cloud service providers’ carbon emissions goals, locations, energy sources and readiness to transition to clean energy.
To help organisations measure carbon emissions against industry peers, Accenture is teaming up with an applied research team at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish a carbon emission scoring system and certification for green cloud solutions. In order to help clients design, implement and operate the most sustainable cloud environments, Accenture is also working with CMU on a new cloud training programme to upskill its Cloud First professionals to help organisations achieve a balance of cloud innovation and green computing practices.
