I’m no computer nerd, I did try writing some computer language once but failed dismally. I just use them like most of us do, as glorified typewriters, calculators and encyclopedias!
But the one thing I do know is that they use energy and get hot.
However, with the advent of wifi and cloud computing, gone are the days of servers in offices being cooled by fans, we now just send an email and think nothing of the energy used. In fact working from home, has been championed as being a green way to work as you don’t get the footprint of commuting.
But don’t be so smug, as this week’s Net Hero guest, Simon Ponsford explained to me, our cloud computers are a massive source of emissions.
Simon who runs a company called Tailpipe revealed the issues: “So the cloud really is just a bunch of data centres. Before, companies used to have their own computer rooms. Generally what they did is they started moving those computer rooms into co-located locations. For the last ten years or so, that trend has been to move to cloud, which is actually, again, a bunch of servers in a data centre.
“You might be writing an email. You click send, it sends it off to a data centre, it gets processed. It might move across multiple data centres to get to its final location, someone else’s email server. And I would say all of that has a carbon footprint.“
Simon added most businesses have no idea how big their IT emissions really are.
“When you start looking at business, people have gotten that their emissions are their buildings, lighting, heating etc., they’ve got their transportation. But most, especially offices, have no idea number three is computing and IT requirements”.
Simon added the cloud has made us detached from our computers’ emissions.
“A decade ago or so, when they had their own computer rooms and they were running them, people understood how much energy was being used but now it’s all elsewhere.”
To help the knowledge gap Simon has created a platform called Tailpipe to measure just what your using from cloud computing and quantify the emissions.
“It connects into their cloud accounts. What’s so good about cloud computing is you get this very granular data. So if you ever go and try and download a file, it says if you use this for so many seconds, you spend this many bytes of data, etc., you know how much data. And so what we’re able to do is really take all that information and process it and tell people what the carbon footprint of that is. “
Listen to the whole podcast to understand more about your own IT footprint.
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