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.

Big IT companies are also the developers of cloud services and
they are keen to see expansion of the services. The study follows a
recent announcement that use of cloud services could triple in the
next two years.

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.

Interviews done 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. The study claims that these
companies could benefit from billions in savings if they do.

Saving billions

Cloud computing allows companies to reduce costs by buying less
hardware and using servers located elsewhere to store, manage and
process data.

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.

In France, where nuclear plants generate the bulk of
electricity, that figure was much lower.

The most compelling argument for cloud
adoption is not cost-savings or energy reductions but speeding up
the time it takes for a company to start trading, investment
analysts argue.

“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.”

The technology has been heralded as a panacea for business but
it also has many opponents. 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.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation
and creator of the computer operating system GNU, has publicly
called the cloud a “trap.” 

In addition, in terms of cutting global emissions, the cloud’s
contribution may look more like a drop in the water, according to
some calculations.

The EU is still haggling over whether it will commit to a 20% or
30% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020. In addition, the chief economist
of the International Energy Agency recently attempted to put any
ambitions for carbon reductions into perspective.

“Some would like to see a 20% reduction and some a 30% reduction
and the difference between those two emissions levels is equal to
only two weeks of emissions from China”, Faith Birol said in a
recent interview with EurActiv.

“This means that even though it would be a big step for the EU …
it would have only limited implications on global carbon emissions
trends, in the absence of other players taking similar steps”,
Birol said.