Now is the time to come down from the clouds

It goes without saying but cloud storage is a vital cog in the wheel of your business. It can even be described as absolutely necessary to keep your business online. However, despite this many businesses are not using it as cost-effective and environmentally friendly as they could be doing.  

It is often stated that making the move to the cloud is seen as an eco-friendly option when it comes to saving and storing your business data. However, it is important to note that the cloud only works on a data centre which requires significant amounts of power to run. 

Also, given the fact that data centres are seeing costs soar above 50% in price per amp, even these cloud systems can cost a lot to run all the time. It won’t come as a surprise but the additional costs associated with this will filter down to businesses soon enough. 

As we are already fully aware, climate change is regularly discussed and one of the biggest threats to our planet. With more and more technology being used across the globe as part of people’s daily lives it will mean that it is impacting significantly on energy consumption, money as well as our overall carbon footprint. 

You will notice that household names such as Facebook and Google own colossal data centres which are used to hold and store data and content generated daily by its users, powering the platform. As a consequence of this, this has led to even more energy being used across the world. If you also bring into the fold the huge uptake in services such as Azure and AWS – which are essentially just computers in data centres around the world – you can see how this can be problematic in the long term. 

It goes without saying but IT networks can use a hell of a lot of power to keep your systems online and holding valuable information that enables your employees to be able to do their jobs effectively. 

Ok, so how can you improve your processes to enable your business to become more environmentally friendly and save your business valuable money? 

1 - Using unnecessary power? 

Could you identify something that is switched on and active within your data centre or cloud hosting environment that could be switched off? For example, things such as archives, old backups that could be wasting power unnecessarily. 

2 – Always on the go? 

Is it really necessary for your servers to be running 7 days a week, 24 hours a day? Perhaps it might be worth looking at ways in which you could be more efficient and intelligent about which systems need to be on at all times. This can be for both on-prem and cloud applications. 

3 – Work towards being more energy efficient 

It can often be the case whereby new technologies are more energy efficient. It is possible to research ways of upgrading or replacing your current systems, minimising your carbon footprint and reducing costs all in one go. 

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is looking to reduce power usage, minimise costs or work towards being more energy efficient by upgrading or replacing your current IT systems or even conducting an IT audit with Advantage then please do get in touch with our IT experts now to discuss your specific requirements. 

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