How Cloud Technology Can Cut Energy Costs

He adds that he sees that market growing from $13 billion in 2011 to $41 billion in 2015, with cloud computing being a key driver.

But despite Pike Research’s predicted 23 percent cut in carbon emissions that this green data center boom could provide by 2015, this boom also creates an environmental paradox for cloud computing, admits Eckhaus.

While consolidating the number of data centers within one end-user’s fleet has clear environmental benefits, he says Woods’ growth predictions means new data centers will still be built—just by different market participants.

He adds that commissioning all this new computing capacity has environmental impacts.

“It’s unfortunate, but this is not especially green,” says Eckhaus, referring to the energy and waste created in building this new capacity and decommissioning old facilities.

But with the continuing growth of social media and mobile applications, as well as big jumps data collection and storage in general across all industries, the need for this new capacity would exist anyway.

Greening this sector now means we’ll get a bigger bang for our environmental footprint down the road, he says.

“Volume of data is growing exponentially and there’s no end in sight,” he adds.