Driving a sustainable, post pandemic economy forward
What would we have done over the past two years without the cloud?
Cloud-based technologies have been around for while now. Despite the well-publicised advantages of eliminating on-premises hardware, centralised resources and a pay-as-grow utility model, many businesses were slow to migrate services, data and workflows to the cloud. It took a global pandemic to shake things up.
The inherent agility, availability and security of cloud services to aid Sustainable printing, helped a global economy cope with the ultimate business continuity challenges. Now that things are getting back to “normal”, the cloud has another important role to play – shaping a sustainable future for businesses of all sizes.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria have seen a remarkable rise to prominence in recent years. Starting from the “who cares wins” principle in 2005, organisations of all shapes and sizes have embraced their wider responsibilities to colleagues, customers and community.
Cloud technologies have carved out a major piece of the ESG agenda, helping businesses to deliver a better life/work balance, enabling remote working and making a significant contribution to green objectives. One such way is businesses adopting sustainable printing solutions, to reduce waste, lower energy consumption and improve efficiency.
Geographic redundancy
One of the key benefits of cloud deployments is the removal of geographic dependency. Users don’t all have to physically sit inside the building where servers are held to be able to access critical data and applications. Work is something we do, not somewhere we go.
Of course, there is also the matter of resilience. By moving on-premises hardware to centralised data centre facilities with multiple redundancy and failover, you are eliminating the single point of failure in a system that could interrupt business as usual.
Energy efficiency
Much of the indirect costs associated with IT and communications infrastructure come in the form of power and cooling. Decentralised computing resources consume more energy than those housed in purpose-built, energy efficient data centres. Use of renewable energy, efficient cooling and heat reclamation technologies and equipment recycling all contribute towards greener computing. One study by Google suggests moving local server-based solutions to the cloud could reduce energy consumption by as much as 87%.
Environmental impact
The green credentials of cloud go far beyond a reduction in on-site power consumption. As a facilitator of remote working it enables users to work from home, reducing the need to commute and cutting emissions.
With new technologies being constantly developed and released, people will obviously upgrade. However, that usually means they’ll just throw out the older version for the newer one. This creates physical and energy waste, adding pressure to landfill. Some components of electronic devices, such as batteries are also extremely toxic to the environment and need to be recycled correctly.
Cloud offers the best of both worlds – availability and sustainability. Two of the key components required to drive a globally connected economy forward.
If you are interested in exploring more sustainable solutions for your printing technologies, get in touch today. Call 01293 562525 or email info@sossystems.co.uk
