AWS Cloud use slashes energy, claims AWS

Amazon seems to have worked out that everyone wants a carbon-reducing reason to buy its products.  That”s the fashion these daze (sic).

The outfit has just released a report claiming that shifting to its cloud product slashes European business energy use by 80 percent instead of operating their own data centres.

To be fair, the research was carried out by 451 Research and was not entirely made up although we doubt that the electricity savings would have applied just to AWS and companies could get electricity savings by moving to any cloud supplier.

The report found that migrating compute workloads to AWS across Europe could decrease greenhouse gas emissions equal to the footprint of millions of households.

It also claims that a 1-megawatt corporate datacentre switching its applications to the cloud could reduce emissions by over a thousand metric tons of carbon dioxide per year was the equivalent of removing over 500 cars from the roads.

Datacentre infrastructure & services at 451 Research, Research director Kelly Morgan said that researchers were surprised about how many opportunities there was for European businesses to increase energy efficiency and reduce emissions by looking at their IT infrastructure.

“If you think of the electricity consumed and emissions produced by tens of thousands of companies across Europe operating their own data centres, this is an area that appears to be overlooked. According to our analysis, moving workloads to the AWS Cloud could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of most organisations’ IT operations.”

The study surveyed senior “stakeholders” at over 300 companies using their own datacentres across a broad range of industries and states that companies could further reduce carbon emissions from an average workload by up to 96 per cent once AWS meets its goal to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy by the year 2025.

Cloud servers are roughly three times more energy-efficient, and AWS datacentres are up to five times more energy-efficient, than the computing resources of the average European company, 451 Research also claims.