Google Advocates Cloud For Environmental Benefits

Google, which initially switched to cloud services for monetary savings, now claims that the use of cloud computing service is beneficial to the environment.

San Francisco (I-Newswire) July 7, 2012 - Google, one of the largest web search engines, which had initially switched to cloud computing services with an aim to boost up its funds, on Monday declared in its Google Green blog that the use of cloud computing services is beneficial for the environment. It advocated that every business, big or small should make use of online productivity tools like the Google Applications that minimizes the use of energy by reducing carbon emissions by 65 percent to 85 percent. Urs Hoelzle, the Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure in Google, wrote in the blog that, lower use of energy leads to reduction of carbon pollution thereby saving our planet from harmful environmental effluences. Moreover, it also saves up a lot of energy for the future use, by any organization.

According to Urs, when an organization uses an unnecessary number of servers for backups and failures, then the organization wastes its money as well as its energy. Hence, he recommended cloud computing services for every organization that has proved to be far more efficient and beneficial than those of conventional server usage along with saving the financial gain of the company and making the environment pollution free. He also stated that cloud systems are engineered by a pool of IT experts so as to diminish the use of energy by the organizations, which they use for operating devices to keep the servers cool.

However, on being asked by the Press, till what extent an organization can save its energy and funds by switching to cloud computing, Google replied citing an instance from the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), when approximately 17,000 users working for the Government had switched over to cloud computing services slashing its server usage, it saved almost 90 % of its energy, reducing 85 % of carbon pollution. Thus, the GSA sliced its yearly energy bill by almost 285 thousand dollars.