Why Cloud Computing Is Efficient Computing

| Josh Henretig

Our friends over in Global Foundation Services published a blog post last night in response to the New York Times series looking at the environmental and economic impacts of cloud computing. These are critical issues to all cloud users and providers, and areas in which Microsoft has dedicated substantial resources, helped create industry metrics for, and publicly shared our best practices on for many years. Among the examples included in the blog post is a Microsoft-commissioned study that looked at the energy efficiency of moving business applications like e-mail from a company’s own servers to the cloud. That study found that large enterprises can cut their energy use per user by at least 30 percent, with small businesses potentially achieving savings of 90 percent. We may not agree with all of the conclusions in the series, but we appreciate their desire to focus attention on these important topics.

I would encourage you to visit the GFS blog to learn how Microsoft is addressing data center resource requirements including power consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions.

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