Does the Cloud have a Green Lining?

While cloud computing has been much in the news lately, few of us really know much about it, what it is, how it works, or what the advantages might be. In April of this year, I wrote about the environment and the supply chain. I spoke of the growing information demands being placed upon the supply chain to meet environmental and origin data and tracking demands. I also touched upon the Information Technology challenges in terms of volume of data, bandwidth and tools necessary to support data management and product level reporting requirements. Of course all of this comes at a cost not only in terms of hardware and infrastructure but also in the amount of energy consumed in meeting these data demands. Cloud computing may be part of the solution to lower the environmental footprint of these growing informational demands. There are two main areas that the cloud can have an environmental impact. One by lowering the energy usage per unit of data processing through better location and utilization of the resources and secondly through improving overall efficiency of the hardware and software – especially the user terminals.

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