Cloud Migration: Five Steps To More Sustainability

Cloud Migration : The climate crisis is forcing companies to act more sustainably. But the desire to protect the environment often conflicts with the need for computing power. Cloud migration can bridge the gap when organisations adopt these five best practices.

It is a fallacy to believe climate neutrality can only be achieved by outsourcing computing capacities. After all, cloud data centres also consume energy. With the right strategy, companies can still improve their carbon footprint. To do this, they should perform a cloud migration in the following five steps:

Choose Green Cloud Providers

The first step for companies looking to migrate to the cloud is choosing the right cloud provider. This also includes finding out about the sustainability efforts of the providers. Cloud data centre operators have many options to monitor their carbon emissions. In addition to using green electricity, they can also reduce their consumption, for example, through sophisticated cooling processes. Reputable providers are happy to provide information about how they protect the environment. Unfortunately, these initiatives cost money, so smaller providers often don’t have a way to simultaneously be cost-effective and environmentally friendly.

Optimise The Use Of Resources For Cloud Migration

Once a provider has been chosen, companies should define a resource utilisation strategy. Most cloud providers today offer tailor-made scalability for computing use. For example, companies can use just-in-time provisioning or pay-per-use models, where resources are only made available when needed. Such methods also reduce costs because the providers only charge for the cloud resources.

Reduce Your Footprint

After choosing a cloud provider and optimising resources, companies need to downsize their IT infrastructure. Miniaturisation is necessary for the migration to the cloud to have any effect on energy efficiency at all. For data protection reasons, companies are usually forced to reserve certain hardware resources on which they store and process confidential data. Nevertheless, the goal should be an in-house IT that is reduced to the essential in order not to risk redundant parallel operation – and thus unnecessary energy consumption. It is also worth looking at the modernization of your infrastructure.

Use PaaS And SaaS In Cloud Migration

Instead of just renting external hardware and letting others manage it, companies can reduce their carbon footprint even further by using external services. Large cloud providers, in particular, provide storage and computing capacities and the appropriate services in the form of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Companies should, therefore, switch to databases or mail servers provided by the provider. Since the servers are running anyway, their environmental friendliness increases with the utilisation. So the more companies use them and do without their own, less sustainable hardware, the better.

Do Green Coding

Companies that develop their software have an additional lever to improve their sustainability: green coding. With this approach, the developers make sure that the computing time is as short as possible – and thus reduce energy consumption. In practical terms, green coding means optimising source codes and eliminating superfluous program lines. In addition, choosing the right programming language for a specific application scenario can work wonders. Companies should entrust their CIO with the task of starting a green coding initiative and setting up guidelines for tuning the self-written software.

Develop A Strategy For CO2 Reduction With Cloud Migration

Eric Berg, Vice President Consulting Expert at CGI, comments: “Reducing the corporate carbon footprint has become one of the most important tasks for organisations in every industry. We support our customers in developing a reduction strategy and identifying suitable measures, despite and because of increasing computing power. Our five best practices for cloud migration help to remain high-performing and at the same time to act sustainably.”

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