UK businesses can save the world by moving to public cloud

UK businesses are being told to accelerate cloud adoption in an upscaled effort to tackle climate change, the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has advised.

The big idea is that it will help curb carbon emissions by making changes to their technological habits.

Businesses are also being encouraged to join the BEIS-backed UK Business Climate Hub initiative, which challenges its members to become net-zero entities by 2050.

“Net-zero means that you are putting no more carbon into the atmosphere than you are taking out of it”, said the advisory notice. “Through the government’s United Nations-backed commitment process, you’re joining an international community of thousands of like-minded businesses.”

From a technology purchasing perspective, BEIS said one action companies should take is to consider moving more of their on-premise IT infrastructure to the public cloud instead of continuing to house it within their own private data centres.

“Large cloud providers are generally more energy-efficient than traditional enterprise datacentres”, said the advisory note. “That’s thanks to IT operational and equipment efficiency, datacentre infrastructure efficiency and higher use of renewable energy. So consider moving from on-premise servers to the cloud.”