Cloud computing can cut carbon emissions by half, report finds | Environment | guardian... - 1 views
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Blue-chip companies could reduce their carbon emissions by 50% if they migrate their data storage operations to the cloud, a new study says.
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The study conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project in London focussed on large IT companies in France and the UK and found that they could achieve large cost savings and carbon reductions by 2020 if they moved their IT systems to shared data networks.
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The Open Data Center Alliance, an umbrella group of more than 300 companies including global banks, released a statement last week saying they had planned to adopt cloud services much faster than thought.
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Interviews undertaken by the Carbon Disclosure Project study's authors show that blue-chip companies in the UK plan to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing from 10% to almost 70% of their information technology by 2020.
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For example by 2020, large UK companies that use cloud computing could achieve annual energy savings of £1.2 billion (€1.39 billion) and carbon reductions equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles, the study says.
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"Carbon reduction is one driver, but not the primary driver," Citigroup's Paul Stemmler said. "The primary driver is time to market. Developers used to take 45 days to get new servers, but in the internal cloud infrastructure that we operate in our own private network, it takes just a couple of minutes."
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There are concerns about privacy and security of data, and open source advocates argue it will lock users into proprietary systems and further big monopolies.
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Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, has publicly called the cloud a "trap."