Strategic and Tactical Assessment of Energy Savings and Carbon Emissions Reduction Opportunities for Data Centers Utilizing SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS
The market for cloud computing services has continued to expand despite a general decline in economic activity in most of the world. In fact, Pike Research expects the growth in cloud computing revenue to continue worldwide between now and 2015 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.8%, with the market increasing from $46.0 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion by 2015.
Growth in cloud computing has some important consequences for both greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sustainability. Thanks to massive investments in new data center technologies, computing clouds in general and public clouds in particular are able to achieve industry-leading rates of efficiency. Simply put, clouds are better utilized and less expensive to operate than traditional data centers. Moreover, Pike Research’s analysis indicates that only the very largest of organizations – both commercial and governmental – will have the capital and expertise to achieve a similar level of efficiency at a comparable cost. As a result, we anticipate that much of the work done today in internal data centers will be outsourced to the cloud by 2020, resulting in significant reductions in energy consumption, associated energy expenses, and GHG emissions from data center operations versus a business as usual (BAU) scenario.
