The Carbon Footprint of IT Operations: AWS Reduces Emissions by 88%

On the one hand, there is a growing need for effective data centers. On the other hand, there are the environmental risks related to the consequent increase in energy consumption.

Yet there is a way to reduce the so-called “carbon footprint” of online operations and someone at the Amazon Web Service headquarters must know it very well because in recent years the big company’s efforts to keep up with the times and respect the ever-growing environmental sensitivity of citizens have been enormous.

According to a study conducted by 451 Research, a technology research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence that provides insight into emerging technologies and the companies that bring them to market, moving on-premises workloads to AWS can reduce the carbon footprint of U.S. enterprise data centers by 88 percent.

Carbon emissions are a factor determined by three elements:

• the number of servers running
• the total energy required to power each server
• the carbon intensity of the energy sources used to power these

A recent blog post by Jeff Barr discusses why using fewer servers and powering them more efficiently is as important in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of an enterprise data center as its energy mix.

Amazon Web Service’s infrastructure was 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the average enterprise data center surveyed, thanks in part to more energy-efficient servers.

A large-scale cloud provider typically achieves around 65% of server utilization rates compared to 15% for on-premise providers, meaning that when businesses move to the cloud, they set up less than a quarter of the servers compared to on-premise solutions.

Not to mention, the energy usage efficiency of an on-premises data center is 29% lower than large-scale cloud providers that use facilities, high-end cooling systems, and equipment optimized for the high-level workload.

Daniel Bizo, Principal Analyst for Datacenter Services & Infrastructure at 451 Research, said: “Amazon Web Services has a structural advantage stemming from its organizational design, which aligns the data center structure and IT teams, engineering expertise, and custom hardware with the Cloud business model that helps drive server utilization far more than is possible for companies“.

Renewables also play a significant role in reducing our carbon footprint, and Amazon will continue to develop new projects in the renewables sector to achieve ambitious goals: 80% renewable energy by 2024 and 100% by 2030. More than 50% of the energy consumed by AWS in 2018 came from renewable sources.

Just a few months ago, AWS announced the construction of four new wind farms and a new solar power park. These projects – two in Ireland, one in Sweden and two in the United States – will produce a total of more than 297 megawatts (MW), with more than 830,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy each year.

Once completed, it is estimated that these solar panels and wind farms, along with the nine previous renewable energy projects, will generate over 2,900,000 MWh of renewable energy per year.

This is proof that the sentiment of citizens and businesses has changed and that sensitivity to sustainability issues has increased dramatically.

“Important sustainability commitments have been made and progress has been made in multiple areas of their operations. However, even with an emphasis on sustainability, data center and IT management is not a core competency of most companies, and they lack the resources to make major and comprehensive investments in infrastructure efficiency. AWS is making significant investments in efficiency and renewable energy”.

What does this mean in practical terms? According to calculations by “451 Research“, by migrating an average 1-megawatt enterprise data center with 30% utilization to AWS, a customer could reduce their carbon emissions by 400 to 1000 tons per year.

Not only that, but this carbon advantage will increase in the coming years, as AWS will continue to take advantage of technological advancement and further increase its use of renewable energy.