We already know that technology is a factor in the degradation and the preservation of the environment. And in technology, data is an increasingly important element regarding the carbon footprint of most companies.
Impact in numbers
We produce more and more data. This sentence can seem anecdotal, but when we consider the quantity of data that we already produce, it becomes more impressive. Indeed, according to IDC, we produce 30 times more data than a decade ago, going from 2 zettabytes (1 zettabytes represents 1 billion terabytes) in 2010 to 64 zettabytes in 2020. We should pass the 180 zettabytes by 2025.
The Pasteur Institute warns that if we reach the 612 zettabytes planned for 2030, data will then represent more than 15% of the total greenhouse gas emissions that we will be able to emit without going over 2°C of global warming (at equal digital technology).
The cloud: a viable response?
Among the available solutions regarding the sustainable management and consumption of data, there is the cloud. As Clément David, CEO of Padok, explains, the installations’ mutualization allows for a better management of the energy consumption according to the company’s traffic. Moreover, cloud service providers optimize their energy consumption to reduce their costs and increase their margins.
Going beyond the measures taken by providers, Silicon explains that companies can reduce their carbon footprint in the cloud by:
- Avoiding oversizing the resources
- Developing applications able to manage charge peaks without mobilizing additional resources
- Using a docker-type technology that enables the development of applications using less and less resources
- Using next-generation cloud servers
The cloud is an interesting solution, but it has an important dark spot: the data centers. We will tackle that pollution factor and its future in our next article.
