Most businesses, large or small expend a lot of capital on IT services and their associated energy cost. Local servers are expensive to buy, run and maintain and often remain idle for much of their lives with resultant inefficiency and unnecessary cost to the planet and bottom line.

Solution – ever heard of cloud computing? In a nutshell it involves migrating your local IT infrastructures to large scale, shared, energy efficient ones provided by remote hosts over the internet. An eye-opening figure on server usage in particular is that the increase in power consumption by a server operating at 5% of its potential load only increases by 20% to operate at 100% load (see graph below). This demonstrates that more often than not, local servers are running idle.

Cloud computing optimises yours and others’ usages based on this principle to gain maximum efficiency from servers, saving on emissions and costs to the consumer. This service is usually provided on a standard monthly subscription basis.

Small businesses stand to make the greatest proportional saving with Microsoft estimating up to a 90% reduction in emissions by switching to cloud-based IT infrastructure.

As we spoke of in a previous blog post, the Low Carbon KEEP scheme is currently running whereby SMEs (fewer than 250 employees) can secure 40% grant funding for capital purchases (such as cloud server space) on spends over £2500.

We recommend one of our tenants and Gold Suffolk Carbon Charter members Strident Computer Systems who are experts in green computing for Suffolk businesses.