Microsoft (News - Alert) has announced that a study commissioned by the company states that instead of running business applications in their own infrastructure, enterprises can help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by a net 30 percent when they run the same applications in the cloud.
Accenture (News - Alert), a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company and WSP Environment & Energy, a consultancy that offers advice on all aspects of environmental, energy, sustainability, climate change, and business risk issues jointly conducted the study, which demonstrates how cloud computing can help companies in operating business applications more efficiently.
In comparison to corporate IT departments, large datacenters such as those run by Microsoft, benefit from economies of scale and operational efficiencies more prominently. The small businesses moving to the cloud achieve even more significant benefits, cutting down as much as 90 percent costs as net energy and carbon savings.
Primarily, the research concentrated at analyzing the results gained by deploying three widely deployed and commonly used Microsoft applications for e-mail, content sharing and customer relationship management. Customers can choose to install each application on their own IT infrastructure or use the corresponding Microsoft cloud application. According to the study results, by choosing the cloud option enterprises can achieve significant reduction in carbon emissions.
Although the study is based upon the selected Microsoft applications, it states that by deploying other applications and cloud service providers, enterprises will yield similar advantages.
During the study, the carbon footprint of server, networking and storage infrastructure for three different deployment sizes comprising of 100, 1,000 and 10,000 users had been analyzed. It was found that as the size of an organization goes smaller, it achieves larger benefits by switching to the cloud. Small organizations with around 100 users can achieve effective carbon footprint reduction yielding them up to a 90 percent savings by using a shared cloud environment instead of their own local servers. It was found in a case study pertaining to a large consumer-goods company that by moving its 50,000 e-mail users in North America and Europe to Microsoft’s cloud, the company was able to save 32 percent of emissions.
A number of factors help in reducing the energy consumption and carbon emissions when an enterprise chooses to move to the cloud. These factors include dynamic provisioning, under which large operations enable better matching of server capacity to demand on an ongoing basis. Multitenancy is a yet another factor, which is achieved from the ability of large public cloud environments to serve millions of users at thousands of companies simultaneously on one massive shared infrastructure.
In Oct. 2010, Microsoft Corp. announced that BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT had been awarded the SWIFTReady Financial EAI label for 2010, thereby achieving seven continuous years of SWIFT certification. BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT is included in the license of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 and is used by global banks and corporate treasuries, including Microsoft's own treasury function.
Raja Singh Chaudhary is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raja's articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Erin Monda
