What the Cloud Does To Reduce Carbon Emissions
While technology has made our financial work infinitely easier, it certainly hasn’t helped to reduce carbon emissions. In 2019, the U.S. alone recorded a staggering 39.6 billion combined purchase transactions. This huge volume of transactions represents millions of tons of CO2 being released to our atmosphere.
Thankfully, the demand for more sustainable practices is here – a sizable 60% of consumers agree that they are more likely to purchase financial services when a more green option is provided. CEOs of major companies are almost unanimous in their response, with over 99% of them responding that sustainability issues are important to the future success of their business. The financial service industry is stepping up to this challenge by relying on cloud computing to consolidate and modernize their business model.
The cloud has 3 major advantages over traditional computing when is comes to reducing greenhouse gasses:
- Lower energy requirements, greater efficiency
- Virtualization of high-carbon materials
- Less material, less wasteful byproducts
These advantages make cloud computing an irresistibly effective tool to reduce carbon emissions. Migrations to the cloud can reduce global emissions by 59 million metric tons of CO2 per year. That represents a 5.9% reduction in total IT emissions. To put it another way, that’s the same carbon reduction as taking 22 million cars off the road.
