Jump to the cloud: Five perks of cloud technology

From reducing energy use to increasing business profitability Telstra’s Connecting with the Cloud report, details five ways to save your business – and the environment – through the cloud:

Save money

Organisations in Australia could potentially save a collective $1 billion in energy-related costs annually by adopting cloud-computing infrastructure over soley on-premise solutions. This is equivalent to the annual carbon emissions from 2.2 million cars, or the energy used by 250,000 Australian households.

Reconsider servers

On-premise servers are money pits. With ICT as a utility, it’s straightforward to remove unused or underperforming infrastructure and take advantage of more energy efficient alternatives. By eliminating on-premise servers in favour of cloud computing, a small or medium-sized business could potentially save between $4,100 and $10,300 per server, per year, in energy costs.

Reduce carbon emissions

Public cloud, which allows multiple organisations to share servers in the same data centre, delivers greater energy reduction and environmental improvement than any other cloud model – such as private cloud. If all Australian organisations migrated to cloud, Australia would reduce its carbon emissions by 4.5 million tonnes per year.

Work flexibly

With 10 million people in Australia commuting every day, and nearly 10 per cent of workers spending 10 hours or more commuting by car, there’s a good reason that the home is increasingly becoming  the new office. Cloud-based communication and collaboration are alleviating productivity drains, and improving workplace flexibility by enabling employees to work remotely just as effectively as if they were in a centralised office. With a rise in remote working, cloud is also removing cars from the road, reducing congestion and carbon emissions.

Scale easily

Cloud technology is not just for big companies. Any size organisation can reduce its carbon footprint and operational cost by moving to the cloud. Centralised cloud solutions offer economies of scale that make them more energy efficient compared with individual in-house or stand-alone servers and data-management systems.