Climate targets are like smartphones – once a niche concern, they're now everywhere. From international targets like the Paris Agreement to those of individual cities, states, institutions and companies, reducing your carbon footprint is the order of the day.

Cloud services are double-edged in this regard. On the one hand, our brave new world of anything-as-a-service means more remote collaboration – or, in other words, less carbon-emitting travel – and more energy-efficient infrastructure.

On the other, data centres consume huge amounts of energy. They account for around three per cent of global emissions – around the same as the global airline industry.

One type of cloud service that's on the rise is IaaS (infrastructure as a service). This is where servers, networking, power equipment, cooling and IT are managed by a cloud provider.

It's big business. The market has been forecast to grow by 24.9% between 2023 and 2028 – hitting $360 billion by 2027.

Can IaaS form part of your company's green policy, and in the process help us reach net zero?

What is IaaS?

Do you keep an electricity generator in your backyard? If you live in the UK or Ireland, we suspect the answer is "no". Like most of us who have the choice, you don't want to produce your own leccy and maintain your own gear – you're happy to leave that to the National Grid or EirGrid. And you're also happy (well, maybe not happy) to pay for the service in the form of electricity bills.

Using IaaS is similar, but instead of keeping your lights on, it's running all the software your company needs.

Most companies bigger than a market stall need the capacity to run different types of software. The days of ring binders, ledgers and box files are receding into misty memory. Everything from accounting to staff data to company policy is now driven by software – and this software increasingly lives in the cloud.

It's complicated. A modern company is like a juggler with a ball in one hand, a banana in the other and a china plate in mid-air. That's why reliable infrastructure is a must.

Infrastructure in this context means servers, networking, power and cooling equipment. But as your company grows, you'll need more servers and more equipment – and your technicians will be working round the clock to fix, patch, upgrade and generally keep the ship on course.

IaaS solves this problem by giving you subscription-based access to infrastructure owned, run and maintained by tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

The business case for this is pretty much that of any cloud service. You're paying for a scalable, secure, optimised service run by some of the best brains in the business – and backed by eye-watering amounts of cash.

But can it also make your company that bit greener?

Can IaaS help reduce your company's carbon footprint?

The short answer is yes. Outsourcing hardware and capabilities to a cloud provider can significantly reduce your carbon footprint – not least because you no longer have to cover carbon overheads in the form of buying and maintaining hardware.

First, some figures. According to Accenture in 2020, migrating to IaaS can reduce energy usage by 65% and carbon emissions by 84%. Meanwhile, research done by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – research funded, we should note, by Google – found that the electricity saved by moving business software to the cloud could power Los Angeles for a year.

One reason why it's more efficient for a company to use IaaS is because of utilisation rates. If you set up your own private data centre, you're doing so in the hope or belief that usage will spike. You're essentially buying hardware for the best-case scenario.

This can mean that your hardware sits idle – an inefficiency which is far from green. By contrast, public cloud servers are highly efficient because they're constantly utilised.

If you're aiming to reduce your carbon footprint, IaaS is one way to go. But it's complicated by the question of how green the big cloud providers actually are.

How green are the big cloud providers anyway?

Data centres guzzle a lot of energy. They're often large and stuffed with equipment that needs huge amounts of energy to run and to keep cool. It's been estimated that by 2025 a third of global energy usage will be from data centres.

Tech Monitor looked at emissions data from 30 technology companies, including several cloud computing providers. It found that Microsoft "has struggled to contain its collective emissions against a backdrop of booming growth".

Meanwhile, Google claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 – but its claim rests on a definition of carbon neutrality that allows it to continue emitting carbon. Since going carbon neutral, it's still managed to emit around 20 million tonnes of carbon. To put that into perspective, it's more than South Wales emits in a year.

Nevertheless, progress has been made in Europe, where over 100 cloud and data centre operators signed the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact. This commits them to climate neutrality by 2030.

There are ways of making data centres greener. These include using renewable energy, improving water efficiency, replacing inefficient legacy hardware and switching to a power-on-demand model.

The picture, then, is mixed. While the big cloud providers are falling short of their climate targets, they can be invaluable in helping you to realise your own.

The bottom line

Net zero is a long way off and can't be achieved through the efforts of only one sector. That said, sustainability is now squarely on the agenda for enterprises everywhere – and IaaS is an essential tool in your green toolbox.

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we know cloud migration like the back of our hand with over 400 migrations and counting. Are you looking for a managed cloud migration service? Please don't hesitate to get in touch.