When people talk about “going green,” they usually mean recycling, installing a solar panel on the roof of their home, or conserving their water usage with briefer showers and sprinkler control systems. When businesses talk about “going green,” they usually mean replacing their current fleet of service vehicles with Priuses, renovating their office building to comply with LEED standards, or removing environmentally-harmful ingredients from their products. People or businesses seldom mention cloud computing as an example of “going green,” perhaps because so many of them do not know of or understand the technology. But cloud computing can be as environmentally-friendly as any of the better-known “green” techniques or innovations. And unlike many expensive and relatively impractical green technologies, cloud computing actually costs less and performs better than its non-green alternatives.
We have defined cloud computing elsewhere as scalable data processing and storage resources delivered as a service via the Internet or another network. Before cloud computing, businesses large and small would have to invest a lot of time, money, and manpower in their on-site IT infrastructure. They would have to purchase, install, and occasionally replace the hardware; coordinate, secure, and manage the networks; and train, hire, or outsource their technical support. Aside from being costly and difficult to maintain, an on-site IT infrastructure could also be inefficient and inflexible. For example, a business could exhaust its existing IT infrastructure during one particularly busy month and have to purchase additional hardware. If the business slows down the following month and never again reaches the same level, the company would be stuck with thousands of dollars in hardware that it didn’t need.
In contrast, cloud computing maximizes hardware and personnel resources and lowers costs by consolidating the IT infrastructures of several companies into the facility or facilities of a single hosting provider. Cloud technology qualifies as “green” because:
-Its maximized resources add up to less physical hardware waste and overall energy usage
-Consolidating personnel ultimately leads to less travel time and less staff, which reduces vehicle emissions and other forms of pollution and waste
-Delivered via the Web, cloud computing encourages telecommuting
IronOrbit provides environmentally-friendly services such as desktop virtualization platforms and other cloud-based infrastructures. We optimize our servers to maximize their processing and storage resources. We only purchase and install the exact amount of hardware we need to fulfill our customers’ requirements. Neither our servers nor the personnel implementing, tweaking, and managing them ever sit around unoccupied. Through our 15 years’ experience providing “green” web-hosted services and solutions, we’ve refined the art of saving our clients money through reduced waste and uncompromising efficiency.
In addition, SuitesPro, Orange County’s premier eco-friendly business suites firm, recently tasked IronOrbit with providing all of its tenants with reliable, flexible, high-performance IT services including Internet access, hosted desktops, and VoIP. SuitesPro utilizes “green” construction practices and conservation technologies to lower energy usage 27%, water usage 48%, and construction material waste 90%. IronOrbit provided SuitesPro’s tenants with a fully-equipped, anywhere-enabled cloud infrastructure that reduced SuitesPro’s IT potential energy costs 30-77%.