Moving computer workloads from on-premise data centres to the cloud can improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint by nearly 80 per cent for companies in India, a report by 451 Research has said. The report surveyed more than 500 organisations with annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion across Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. This included over 100 respondents from India.
According to the report, the data centre market in India is expected to have the highest growth among the APAC markets surveyed throughout the forecast period (2019-2024). As the data centre activity continues to surge, energy consumption will also increase and that will make energy efficiency a focus for enterprises, public sector users and data centre providers.
“The server-level efficiencies of Indian organisations exceeded their peers in other surveyed APAC countries as a result of higher rates of virtualisation and a more aggressive stance towards workload consolidation.” Kelly Morgan, research director at 451 Research, said. “Indian organisations drive their systems somewhat harder, and their server infrastructure is among the youngest on average in APAC. Cloud providers are driven to make all parts of their infrastructure work in sync to increase efficiency, from design to operations, to lower costs and provide IT services at scale. Also, the lack of accessible and affordable corporate renewable energy options leaves a significant amount of carbon reduction potential on the table.”
Due to India’s coal-heavy electricity generation, moving the workload equivalent of one MW of IT data centre capacity to the cloud would yield a massive carbon reduction of 3,449 metric tonnes per year on average. If cloud providers were able to provide services powered by 100 per cent renewables, a total of 4,235 metric tonnes of CO2e (Carbon dioxide equivalent) emission could be avoided by running the same enterprise and public sector workloads in the cloud, this is equivalent to annual carbon emissions from more than 900 cars.
The research also found that cloud-based data centres have better utilisation rates and offer further potential energy savings of more than 11 per cent due to their highly energy-efficient power and cooling systems.
