According to a report by 451 Research, the Indian companies and public sector organizations that migrated from on-premises data centers to cloud infrastructure could expect to reduce their energy and carbon footprint by nearly 80%.
The report that includes over 100 survey respondents from India, found that cloud service providers who tap into local renewable energy market to run their operations in India can boost carbon emissions savings.
451 Research estimates that if just 25% of the 1,200 largest publicly-traded businesses in India put one megawatt (MW) of compute workload into the cloud, powered by renewable energy, it would save the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from 160,000 Indian households.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading players, who plans to be net zero carbon across its business by 2040, is moving towards net carbon neutrality goals in India with initiatives in infrastructure efficiency, renewable energy, water sustainability, electric mobility, sustainable packaging, and building awareness through community engagement.
The report revealed that energy efficiency gains of cloud data centers came from their use of the latest, most energy-efficient servers, which typically run at higher utilization rates than on-premises data centers. These two factors combined led cloud data centers to use 67.4% less energy.
The average server utilization in APAC enterprises was just under 15%. By contrast, 451 Research shows that cloud operators utilize servers well above 50% to find the right balance between efficiency and application performance.
The data centre market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16% from 2019-24, the highest in the Asia-Pacific region. “As data centre activity continues to surge in India, so will energy consumption, which will make energy efficiency a focal point in the market.
Reference- Live mint, ‘Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to the Cloud for APAC’ Report, 421 Research website