With more and more organizations opting to store their data on cloud computing systems rather than under their own roofs, outsourcing data centres are springing up like mushrooms to answer the demand. That development, say the folks at this Colorado-based thinktank, spins off into all kinds of good stuff, including savings in manpower, savings in money and—here’s where the world’s interests kick in—savings in energy. Indeed, say the analysts behind the research, this cloud business could help reduce the world’s energy costs by almost a third over the next decade.

First up, the stuff that lines the pockets.

Revenue from these proliferating data centres, predicts the new research, will inflate to a compound annual growth rate over the next decade of 29%. In hard numbers, that means a revenue climb from $46 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion in 2015. More than that, says the report—titled “Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency”—new investments in the stuff will continue to spur greater efficiency for those dollars spent.

Indeed, Pike Research’s analysis suggests that, absent the cloud, only the very largest commercial or governmental organizations would have the capital and expertise required to achieve the same kind of efficiency at a comparable cost.

Green Shoots

But it’s the trending transformation of another kind of green, says Pike’s senior analyst Eric Woods, that’s even more impressive.

“Cloud computing revenue will grow strongly over the next decade,” Woods says. “But the reduction in energy consumption will be even more significant.”

Pike forecasts that, if the world continues along its current cloud-computing adoption curve, overall data centre energy consumption will be slashed by a dramatic 31% in the period between 2010 and 2020.

This news comes on the heels of other publicly stated initiatives that acknowledge the wasteful footprint of the globe’s infinite IT goings on. Facebook, for one, recently announced that it intends to make public the details of its data centres such that others might benefit from this massive operation’s evolving understanding of energy efficiency. According to the social media giant, the servers in its refurbished data house—which apparently took two years and tens of millions of dollars to complete—run 38% more efficiently, and 24% less expensively, than those in their comparable peers.

One Centre, Less Energy

Simply put, goes the report, clouds are better utilized and less expensive to operate than traditional, siloed data repositories are. The more disparate operations they take in under their generous eaves, the more efficiently is this channel of energy expended.

And all signs point to a continued drift in this direction. As increasingly more of the work that was conventionally performed in internal data centres is consigned to the cloud, the world’s basket of energy consumption, associated energy expenses and greenhouse gas emissions suffers ever fewer hands dipping into its bounty.

Consider, too, the very prickly subject of cloud security, heretofore much maligned for its apparently inherently contained contradiction but, in a recent show of enlightenment, perhaps rewritten as saviour rather than villain.

Big Picture Author

In this Wall Street Journal article, a big-picture pundit introduces the extraordinary idea that the cloud may in fact be the safest place to store our data, the deafening cries that have long argued the opposite notwithstanding.

The article’s author, John Bussey, submits that data consigned to the cloud actually enjoys an abundance of sophisticated security-enhancing features that an organization, particularly one in the small-to-mid-sized category, simply couldn’t access on its own.

“The sheer size of cloud businesses like Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services,” the piece goes, “allows significantly more investment in security policing and countermeasures than almost any company, large or small, could afford themselves.”

Go Big to Stay Secure

More than that, Bussey points out, the average computer user is not as attentive to even the most routine security imperatives as he needs to be. But sign on with just a “plain-vanilla” cloud package provider and you automatically score security basics such as updated antivirus runs and as-needed software patch applications. Any upgrade from there improves your lot further with enhanced security features like data firewalls, high-end encryption and 24-hour tech support.

“Small and medium businesses are insane not to leverage the advantages of cloud computing,” Jim Reavis, of the industry group Cloud Security Alliance, told Bussey. “It ends up being almost in all cases a security upgrade, because they can’t otherwise afford the practices.”

A Lone Voice in the Wilderness

Of course, this voice in the wilderness is still powerfully eclipsed by the hue and cry of the status quo. And it’s a position endlessly reinforced by the studies that continue to pour in with findings that tell stories of organizations’ enduring wariness of the idea of entrusting their data with an off-site third party. And this is the scene even in spite of an ongoing flurry of initiatives undertaken by IT security vendors, cloud providers and industry evangelists themselves to redress this issue.

Still Talking to Ghosts

Just this week, a study unveiled at the V3 Virtual Cloud Summit in Great Britain reported that a full 87% of enterprises remain concerned about security in the cloud.

And some 72% of small (fewer than 100 employees), and 63% of mid-sized (100 to 999 employees) companies told technology research firm IDC, in 2008, that security was their most pressing concern when it came to the notion of transferring their operations to the cloud. That those numbers had contracted to 50% and 47%, respectively, when the same survey was conducted three years later, is a thundering step in the right direction.

Because revolution, after all, is a slow business. Remember how long it took to come around to that broccoli?

But the call for corporate responsibility is a profound and meaningful one whose noisy bleats are unrelenting. And this inside a growing understanding that more and more pollution derives from computing. The Environmental Protection Agency in the US declared that a full 1.5% of total electricity consumed in 2006 came from this source.

Take fresh heart then that there is a new opportunity for you to be greener still—and it lies in the skies.

Cloud Reduces Corporate Carbon Footprint

A recent Microsoft-commissioned study has concluded that cloud computing — the remote-hosting darling of the computerized corporate landscape that’s already turning heads with its promises of decreased costs and increased flexibility — is actually good for the environment.

By comparing the energy usage of those business applications that are resident on site to their cloud-based equivalents, researchers have identified a remarkable disparity that points to the latter’s potential to save companies — at minimum — some 30% in energy consumption and carbon emissions.

At the far end of the scale, enormous public cloud environments and large data centres, such as those helmed by the likes of Google and Amazon, enjoy those savings courtesy of vast economies of scale, virtualization, dynamically-provisioned software and other well-entrenched operational efficiencies that already characterize their massive operation.

Benefits Even Greater for Small Business

More critically, though, those organizations at the other end — i.e., small businesses that employ just 100 users or so — can score even higher by undertaking a switch to a cloud-based environment.

By incorporating the dynamic provisioning, more responsive server utilization and other efficiency-inspiring strategies cloud computing offers, these companies stand to save by an astonishing 90% or more. The smaller the operation is, it turns out, the greater the environmental benefits.

Mid-sized companies whose user base hovers around 1,000 can expect savings of 60%-90%.

The Methodology

The study honed in on three popular on-premise Microsoft business applications: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007. It contrasted each with a cloud-based alternative, namely: Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online.

Methodically, it determined the carbon footprint and energy expenditure produced by typical corporate IT data centres, complete with servers and storage dedicated to separate applications. It did so considering deployment scenes featuring 100, 1,000 and 10,000 users. It compared and contrasted traditional and hosted scenarios.

In turn the study, conducted by Accenture and sustainability consulting company WSP Energy & Environment, concluded that there is much to be gained by a wholesale adoption of hosted computer services. Indeed, researchers point out simply shifting 50,000 e-mail users from individual Exchange servers to Microsoft Exchange Online translates into emissions savings of 32%.

The future, more apparently than ever, resides in the clouds.

SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document-management platform from Microsoft. Effectively a content-management system, SharePoint allows groups to set up a centralized, password-protected space for document sharing. Here, documents can be stored, downloaded and edited, and then uploaded for continued sharing. SharePoint can also host specialized applications, such as wikis and blogs, from within a browser.

The logic behind the concept is that an organization’s effectiveness can by streamlined by having someone else oversee the maintenance of a server, and the management of the data on it. Corporate clients have outsiders host applications on a SharePoint platform such that developers can focus on the application and not have to worry about such minutiae as access, permissions and coordinating look-and-feel with other applications.

A feature-rich document storage site and retrieval system, SharePoint boasts a cache of tools that includes document storage, tasks, calendars, announcements and contacts—data-dense material that SharePoint frees from a multitude of desktop folders on company servers. Users can also sync up their MS Outlook to work with SharePoint to share calendars and appointments.

SharePoint works in units called sites, which are really just collections of tools. A single business may have many sites and sub-sites, each with SharePoint’s drill-down capability.

Users can access SharePoint from anywhere: through their web browser, Outlook or compatible Microsoft Office applications like Word 2007 and Excel 2007. And you can further customize your SharePoint site with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 access.

It is a brilliant, easy and seamless integrate into your corporate culture. Good-bye Windows Explore with in nested directories and unsearchable documents.

360 Visibility: Points worth Sharing

At 360 Visibility, our hosted SharePoint service has been built with component-level redundancy, and is housed in one of the most sophisticated data centres on the market. Clients can develop business-line applications delivered through a secure portal to help increase their efficiencies.

With the click of a button they can set up new accounts, reset passwords and manage storage. The whole point of hosted SharePoint, after all, is to relieve non-technically minded administrators of the burden of IT expertise. And users also gain access to 360’s considerable resources to create their own rocking applications featuring cool and uber-efficient functionality like automated processes and event-driven e-mail alerts.

And of course the choice to sign on with 360’s hosted SharePoint services means access to an expertly managed—and individually customized—Microsoft Windows environment without having to invest in the building and maintenance of a comparably outfitted in-house system. You pay only for the service you need and sidestep handily the initial outlay of installation, to say nothing of the ongoing cost of support.

Best of all, SharePoint users can rest assured knowing their SharePoint site—managed capably by Microsoft Gold Certified staff—is always available to them through redundancy and 24×7 monitoring.

1) Employ technology at every turn.

Everything from purchasing to bookkeeping to environmental stewardship at a company can find betterment through automation—and it ain’t bad for the environment, either. If it’s possible to perform a task smarter and faster by computerizing it, go for it. Microsoft Office, Outlook, Sharepoint and Exchange Server 2007 are just some of the tools poised to deliver your business into a place of efficiency and productivity it’s never known before.

2) Hand over the reins.

From consulting service to complete installation of your IT infrastructure, consider outsourcing partial or complete management of your IT functions to those with a handle on the stuff. Outside experts can deliver solid, practical, cost-effective solutions in all areas of technology, including hardware installation, software implementation and physical maintenance of equipment—and free up your staffers for the business at hand.

3) Pay attention to your network.

A well-tended, high-performance network based on intelligent routers and switches can play a vital role in improving your corporate efficiency by ensuring that customers, employees and suppliers get secure access to the core business intelligence that will keep things hopping. Slow or dysfunctional networks will hamper employees’ nimbleness, and could cost you opportunities and revenues. Stay alive to your network needs, and expand or upgrade as required.

4) Streamline customer interface.

If you’re a lively and constant presence for your customers, then you’re doing something right. By tying your network phone system to a clever CRM solution, like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you enhance the efficiency of this relationship that much more. And, while you’re at it, stay current: analog, digital and key phone office systems are jalopies from days gone by. Jump aboard the speeding train of voice and data networks, and haul your business into the present with the most current telephone technology out.

5) Develop a long-range technology plan.

Just as you have short- and long-term business objectives, so too should you have short- and long-term strategies for adapting your technology to accommodate them. Stagger your revitalizing efforts, so your obsolete hardware overhaul doesn’t disrupt your operations wholesale.

6) Standardize documents and procedures.

Altogether too much time gets wasted duplicating processes and designing forms the guy down the hall designed two months ago. If you’ve got a store of templated materials that everyone can access electronically, it saves headaches and time in equal measure. And the consistent use of documentation will demonstrate your professionalism to those with an eye on the scene.

7) Adopt a business management solution.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a complete ERP plan that’s fast to implement, straightforward to configure and easy to use. With it, businesses can enjoy instant access to accurate, up-to-the-minute financial information; tools to plan, manage and execute a world-class manufacturing operation; and the ability to tailor their sales, purchasing and pick/pack/ship cycle processes to meet specific needs and keep pace with competitive markets and low margins.