Rack Pack Blog

Will Cloud Computing add value to the marketing mix?

Posted by Rack Packer - 07/09/10 at 09:09:52 am

The Advertising Industry is cutting through the hype and beginning to realise the Cloud’s potential 

For the past 18 months the hype has suggested that Cloud Computing will be the next game changer. But will it? Or are we simply witnessing the next major land grab by a few technology giants on a perceived new market segment?

A plethora of recent surveys has shown that whilst organisations are generally aware of the cloud, they are reticent to dive in and procure services. For every survey that suggests that a CIO is considering Cloud Computing as a priority for his or her organisation you will find another survey stating that business leaders haven’t a clue as to its meaning or how it will aid them.

With over 20 different definitions of cloud computing in play, it’s hardly surprising that the market is suffering from a ‘fog’ of confusion. Several reasons are given, which include hype over substance, internal resistance and security concerns - all of which suggest that the industry spin doctors need to work harder to get the cloud benefit message across.

The industry needs to focus less on the technology and more on the needs of the customer. We need much less of the ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ type jargon and more of the ‘Business as a Service’ approach. Cloud is about evolution of services not revolution.

The core attraction of cloud is that companies can avoid buying and running their own hardware, software and other equipment by contracting with a hosting vendor to supply the systems on its own servers. This outsourcing of computing resources offers flexibility, scalability, agility and costs savings over the traditional in house approach. Four attributes which should, and is, making cloud a prime candidate for early adoption by campaign and project managers.

Campaigns and one off events are notoriously dynamic and really benefit from the ‘on demand’ nature or elasticity that the cloud offers. In theory the cloud should rid us of server crashes as we clamour for the hottest tickets and news, with spikey demand being controlled and managed.

StreetSmart, which asks diners in the nation’s top restaurants to give an extra £1 on top of their bill during the festive period, was one of the first UK Charities to have its website fully hosted and managed on a cloud platform.

Glenn Pougnet, Director of StreetSmart, said: “The cloud has presented us with the perfect solution for handling the short term increase in demand that we face with our annual StreetSmart Christmas campaign. The cloud has removed the worry for us of having to manage our website capacity ensuring that our site is always available to potential donors and restaurant patrons. We are left free to concentrate on running the campaign and raising vital funds to give homeless people hope and a new start in life.”

Think Publishing, the communications agency behind Kate Humble’s charitable web site Stuffyourrucksack.com has also turned to the cloud to cope with seasonal visitor peaks. Think Publishing increases processing power during the summer months, when its campaigns are at their most active, targeting travellers embarking on their vacations, and more importantly only pays for the additional short term resources consumed.

Conversely, ineffective or unworkable projects can be reviewed and pulled without the additional burden of wasted hardware investment affecting the decision making process. Social media, viral campaigns and trending topics can all be maximised and exploited through the real time deployment of cloud servers, providing an agency with agility, thought leadership and competitive advantage.

New Media Age recently revealed that only 17 of the total 200 videos featured in their Viral Brand Chart appeared for a second week, meaning there’s only an 8.5% chance of being a top-ten viral for more than a week. The simple reason given for this is that impact of a viral video is simply diminished because of the volume of video content being uploaded to sites such as YouTube, which receives more than 24 hours of content every minute. Apparently we don’t want to share things once they’re past their sell by point because we don’t want to seem uncool. Gone are the days when we would have planned to support a viral campaign for several weeks and would have utilised servers accordingly. Now we need an infrastructure that can cope with high demand over a short time frame - the perfect attributes of the cloud.

Likewise if we are fortunate enough to have a campaign that attracts the support of an uber Tweeter such as Lady Gaga or a Taylor Swift and they happen to tweet about your brand/offer etc - you can expect a huge surge in traffic. In the old days you might have been able to contact the PR and asked for a timed ‘mention’ to assist with capacity planning but not today. That’s not how the net works. You simply need to be prepared and be able to increase capacity on the fly.

But cloud shouldn’t simply be viewed as a technology. It does generally have the ability to change organisational process for the better. One huge advantage of the cloud is that it offers designers the ability to test, create and share without their destiny being controlled by “corporate IT”. It is often thought that the IT department of the future will be staffed with orchestrators and strategists not simply technicians. The IT department will become drivers of innovation not merely suppliers.

With the right culture in place, the cloud has the ability to bring together the talents of the creative world allowing them to work collaboratively on projects that interest and excite them. This is already happening but as cloud based technology advances it will become even easier.

The US Media Group, Journal Register Company, demonstrated this concept back in July by running the intriguing experiment of involving community Crowdsourcing and the use of free online publishing tools for the production of all their publications. Journal Register produced all of its 18 daily websites and newspapers using only free web-based tools, such as the cloud based Google Docs, social media websites, Facebook and Twitter and the open-sourced software, Scribus.

At the time, Journal Register Company’s Chief Executive Officer, John Paton stated that whilst his company would not be converting to a fully integrated Crowd/Cloud model in the immediate future, he believes that the idea is a potentially viable one.

No one should claim that moving to the cloud suits everyone or that it is easy. Agencies will need to be convinced that service levels are real, tools are available to track and manage individual clients/campaigns, billing is transparent and that the vendor has the appropriate expertise and security processes in place to safeguard their business. Trust will be the single biggest factor in the success of the cloud.

But overall, the arguments for adopting the cloud are too compelling to ignore and it would appear that the media industry is beginning to cut through the cloud hyperbole and is starting to investigate how it can reinvent its IT architecture and processes into a much more flexible and efficient tool for business.

All for One Cloud and One Cloud for All

Posted by Rack Packer - 19/07/10 at 03:07:28 pm

Today has seen the vision of an open source cloud move one step closer with the launch of the OpenStack project.

 

The project has the backing of over 25 leading technology companies and NASA, and is designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. The project’s key aim is to enable anyone to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments. OpenStack is not itself a cloud provider, rather it is a software offering that lets the end user build a cloud, either for public or private use.

 

An OpenStack Design Summit was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.  Much of the code tested is written in Python, using the Tornado and Twisted frameworks.

 

 An open cloud is essential if the long promised benefits of cloud computing are to be fully realised. The success of the cloud will be ultimately determined by the levels of choice and freedom that it offers the end user. Choice and freedom equals innovation, flexibility and usability. An open cloud will provide the tools to enable end users to build and customise their own computing clouds to suit their specific needs, budgets and timescales. And more importantly no one or entity owns it.

 

The internet would not be what it is today, had it not been built on open and interoperable standards. The cloud’s success will be driven by a global connected community delivering applications and media using a cloud that fosters creativity and openness. A truly open cloud will encourage tomorrow’s innovators to innovate today.

 

The industry does not want, or need, a digital sky dominated by proprietary clouds from a few deep pocketed large computing brands, it needs to ensure that people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services – competition is healthy and needed.

 

It is a theme that Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission, strongly voiced earlier this month when he stated: “Fostering openness and preventing closed markets and unfair competition is key to the development of innovative digital media and technology in Europe. Open and interoperable environments drive down the cost of innovation.”

 

For the cloud to be truly ‘open’ code standardisation is a fundamental requirement, one of the key aims for OpenStack, and the reason so many founder member ‘competing’ companies have put aside their traditional rivalries, is to establish a common standard base.

 

It is essential that end users enjoy total interoperability, making it easier for them to connect clouds together, moving data between and off them when they choose – rather than being locked in to one providers cloud.  

 

If end user needs to change providers, and sometimes this can be an enforced choice: a merger or acquisition or as a result of a new regulation; they need to be able to do so easily. Resources that may have been spent on difficult migrations can instead be spent on core business development.

 

One of the value propositions of the open cloud model is the ability to scale resources as needed. An open interface will enable end users to build out new and existing systems at speed and with agility. And if we look at perhaps the biggest perceived barrier to cloud adoption, the issue of security and data integrity, we can see that the open source model enables the end user to take advantage of a commercial partner’s scale and infrastructure, whilst tailoring the code to ensure that their valuable assets don’t leave the in house environment.  The true hybrid cloud.

 

In essence the OpenStack project is attempting to deliver a type of co-operative cloud that enables economies of scale to build whilst returning control back to the community that built it. In theory OpenStack could extend the benefits of open source into the full computing stack and that could result in the largest single cloud ecosystem next to the Web itself. A claim too far? Only time will tell.

 

Finally, OpenStack should not be confused with the ‘Open Cloud Manifesto’ initiative that was heralded with much fanfare in March 2009. This saw IBM lead dozens of major tech companies in calling for open cloud standards. However the call was not heeded by all the perceived major cloud players, with rival Microsoft Corp dismissing the effort and accusing IBM of seeking to exert control of the field, whilst Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc, Salesforce.com Inc were all conspicuously absent from a list of companies endorsing it.

 

So what’s different with OpenStack? OpenStack is attempting to build interoperability in public, not behind closed doors, and without any exclusionary practices. Such environments are not conducive to building trust and a spirit of co-operation, both of which are key ingredients of developing a successful standard.

 

Oh and yes and with OpenStack you can actually download the code now.

Plenty of spare storage capacity up in the Cloud

Posted by Rack Packer - 12/05/10 at 05:05:31 pm

 Let cloud storage control your data before it controls you.

“Terabyte storage? That’s so last decade Darling. This year’s black is the zettabyte.”

For us luddites still mourning the loss of the 1.44MB (2.0MB unformatted) disk, the thought of the zettabyte is truly terrifying (although pretty handy for Scrabble).

The zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes and according to IDC, in its latest global digital output report, the world’s generated data volume is expected to pass through the magic zettabyte figure for the first time later this year going on to exceed 35 zettabytes by 2020. (A zettabyte is estimated to be roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States, or for Jack Bauer fans, a full-length episode of FOX TV’s hit series “24″ running continuously for 125 million years.)

As IT becomes ever more prevalent in every aspect of our lives, the amount of data generated and stored is growing at an astounding rate. It is estimated that 45GB of data currently exists for each person on the planet and that this will grow annually by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020, as all major forms of media complete their transformation from analog to digital.

Or to put it another way, it is estimated that the bytes of data generated by digital cameras, mobile phones, enterprise IT systems and devices will equal the number of grains of sand on the world’s beaches within the next year or two. And whilst 85 percent of this data is predicted to come from consumers snapping photos, surfing Web pages and sending e-mail, about 60 percent of that data will still enter and cross corporate networks. Simply put, 35% more digital information is created today than the capacity exists to store it.

Over the next few years, businesses will face tough decisions on how to store, find and access information whilst complying with regulations. Much of the data is unstructured, unmarked and resides in a variety of disparate locations, makes it almost impossible to retrieve and use.

This unprecedented growth in data volumes is having a significant effect on many businesses, with the most obvious impact being ongoing operational costs, performance and compliance.

And this is where the cloud may find its true calling. For a couple of years now, the industry has been touting the concept of cloud hosting as the ‘knight in white armour’ that promises to transform the way we operate in the future, whilst secretly praying it doesn’t pan out to be ‘a nerd in tin foil’.

Companies that are following the classic ‘strategy by bandwagon’ approach to business have not exactly been backward in slapping the word ‘cloud’ over any product that has an internet association - in the hope that they’ll mop up. This marketing approach has resulted in mixed messages and confusion, with cloud computing being hailed and jeered in equal measure. Deriving obvious benefits from cloud computing has not always been apparent to the market.

Data Storage represents a really viable utilisation of the cloud. It is very clear that the volume of data is going to keep growing and companies need to address this demand. IDC reports that the number of files, images, records and other digital information containers will grow by a factor of 67, each needing to be managed, secured and protected.

Organisations face a stark choice. Do they invest, and continue to invest,  in hardware and software - King Canute style? Can they re-engineer their business processes to cope with the additional data demands without increasing labour costs? (Interestingly the IDC state that IT professionals globally will only grow by a factor or 1.4 despite the data deluge) Or will they simply turn a blindish eye and hope that the various Data Protection Agencies don’t catch up with them?

Cloud computing gives organisations the opportunity to buy ‘peace of mind’. Data storage is a headache and can prove to be a costly one at that. By utilising a cloud service provider’s infrastructure on a demand basis, organisations can rid themselves of the hardware investment and the aggravation. Despite rumours to the contrary, a private cloud model offers a secure data repository that is protected by cast iron service guarantees (and if your service provider can’t provide them – consider looking elsewhere), which can either be used as a standalone option or integrated within existing client infrastructure to form a hybrid solution.

And it’s not just the corporate world that will see cloud storage boon. 2010 ABI Research released this week shows that revenue related to US consumer use of cloud-based backup technology will grow from almost $75 million in 2009 to more than $372 million in 2015, (CAGR of 27.89 percent) - helped by the rise of netbooks and devices such as the iPad.

Cloud storage shouldn’t be that hard a concept to grasp, afterall Man naturally looks to the skies when seeking additional storage and archiving space at home - its called the Loft.

I’m off to get a calculator to work out next year’s craze – the lovvabyte.

Give the cloud a break. Are the fears surrounding cloud computing security justified?

Posted by Rack Packer - 20/04/10 at 10:04:39 am

You couldn’t have escaped cloud stories this past week (quite literally if you’ve attempted to travel across European airspace). Volcanic ash aside, the computing topic that appears to have grabbed the attention concerns the physical security of the cloud, or rather the storing of data on a server somewhere in cyberspace.

Several vendors have stepped forward and launched cloud security products and several respected and authoritative sites such as the BBC and CIO have issued stories on the subject.

“Securing cloud computing is a shared responsibility requiring the active participation of cloud providers,” stated Jim Reavis, Executive Director, Cloud Security Alliance in one release. Adam Gross, senior vice president of marketing for Dropbox said the cloud needs the trust of users, a theme mirrored by Mike Elgan from Computerworld.com who warned users against being too trusting of their cloud provider.

And the BBC revealed that with so many students becoming ever reliant on free collaborative online tools, some colleges have gone as far as banning cloud computing completely. This is not entirely new information. Back in December 2009, a survey revealed that as many as three quarters of UK CIOs viewed security issues as a major barrier to adopting cloud computing.

So are there real issues with the cloud and security, will cloud providers have to up their game to gain trust or are we witnessing, as in the case of the colleges, a knee jerk reaction? (or a convenient excuse to get homework in on time!)

The answer is a probable combination of all these scenarios to varying degrees but to imply that the ‘cloud’ is insecure per see sets a dangerous precedent. Data protection is the responsibility of the data owner, simple as. The rules and policies for data protection don’t change because a company opts for using the cloud over other methods.

Way back in June 2008, Gartner issued a report “Assessing the Security Risks of Cloud Computing.”, and stated Cloud computing has “unique attributes that require risk assessment in areas such as data integrity, recovery, and privacy, and an evaluation of legal issues in areas such as e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and auditing”. But are these not issues that any business will face when securing their data, cloud or otherwise?

James Staten, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, makes this point in his piece for CIO “Security ultimately rests with you, the business - not the cloud provider”.

Indeed, there are some specifics that need addressing with cloud, such as determining the physical location of the servers to ensure that certain data does not reside outside of certain geographic boundaries, but overall the approach to using cloud should be the same as using your own infrastructure. And even this is not an insurmountable barrier. Perhaps it is inevitable that the hype surrounding cloud computing has left many with the impression that the cloud is some vaporous computing magic that hovers above the globe. It’s not.

The cloud is physically hosted in data centres and these data centres are in known locations. The fears raised around cloud security appear to be driven by a lack of distinction, or understanding, about the differences between public and private clouds. If you are seeking cast iron guarantees over the security and location of your data assets then you simply ensure that your cloud provider meets your requirements via the SLA and contract.

Sydney Water CIO Tim Catley made this point in an article with the Australian when stating that his organisation did use cloud services, and that the agreement with the provider involved knowing where information was stored. “We do have a major enterprise component that we run (in the cloud) and we know where that data sits, and we’ve been assured that the data sits there and it’s contractually written into the agreement. It’s in Australia and it has to be in New South Wales for us. So we know where that system is.”

And this example debunks another myth surrounding cloud. You can chose to use a provider that offers full SLA’s including high availability and uptime guarantees etc with cloud computing.

Another argument suggests that the real, and key, fear factor for a CIO when considering cloud appears to be loss of direct control. When the company’s assets are safe in his or her own datacentre, managed by the company’s own employees, on systems that are directly managed then the creation of an audit trail and accountability is far simpler. The control remains with the CIO. In the cloud environment it is perceived that much of this control is outsourced, but none of the accountability.

But this argument is hardly armour plated. As this latest example of a major security breach illustrates, you can have the best systems in place but you can’t legislate for human error.

Last week a journalist with the Register (major influential UK IT news portal) received a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which was not encrypted or password protected, containing the full names and dates of birth of 10,006 people in jobs or applying for jobs where a UK Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) disclosure is required. The journalist received this file in error from a member of Gwent Police Force’s CID Data Management Unit who had used his/her email client’s auto complete function when sending the file by email to five colleagues (one colleague having a similar name to the journalist, whose address had been auto stored after two previous pieces of correspondence).

Amongst the many questions this example raises are: Why was the file not encrypted? Why was the file emailed? Why so many recipients in the cc field? The fallout from this latest high profile security breach is only just beginning and is set to run and run, but it clearly highlights that it is not the technology at fault but poor security practise.

In fact deploying cloud architecture in this case, could have prevented this situation from arising. The data files could have been held centrally, accessed via a secure dedicated connection, only accessible to authorised individuals, and only certain data sets visible and all fully monitored for audit purposes.

Rather than scare mongering about security in the cloud, perhaps we would do better to remind businesses of their responsibilities and obligations in this area generally, after all keeping managing and maintaining data locally is fraught with hazards and risk.

Adopting a workable and failsafe data and security policy must be the starting point for any business. What data do you need, how do you collect it, how do you store it, who has access rights, how do your retrieve it, how do you protect it and what do you do should disaster strike? Once an organisation has determined its policy it can then consider its execution, and cloud can play an important role in this strategy.

Today’s cloud technology allows us to encrypt, back up and store critical data securely, relatively easily and cost effectively delivering significant opex and capex cost savings (an important factor given that data growth rates are doubling every two years with IDC estimating that 45GB of data currently exists for each person on the planet: a staggering 281 billion gigabytes in total.)

No one should claim that moving to the cloud suits everyone or that it is easy, the concept of successfully implementing a tiered infrastructure has baffled organisations for years, but this shouldn’t mean it’s benefits are dismissed out of hand for the sake of eye catching headlines. The arguments for cloud computing are too compelling to ignore but we need to ensure that the hype - both good and bad - doesn’t saddle it with too many misconceptions that prevent businesses from making informed choices.

Security is a major concern but it should be a major concern for any organisation no matter what it’s IT infrastructure, policies and practises.

 

 

 

Will Cloud Computing lead to Global Smog?

Posted by Rack Packer - 30/03/10 at 03:03:34 pm

New Greenpeace Report claims coal fuels much of the cloud’s growth

 

Today has seen the release of the Greenpeace report: “Make IT Green - Cloud Computing and its contribution to Climate Change” catch the headlines. The report basically claims that the rise of cloud computing is increasingly reliant on the use of dirty fossil fuels and that urgent action needs to be taken to redress the situation.

 

According to the report, Greenpeace claims that the energy consumption and carbon emissions of cloud computing is already significantly higher had been previously estimated. Using carbon emission projection data provided by McKinsey (included within the 2008 study Smart 2020: enabling the low carbon economy in the information age published by the Climate Group) and updating it with data supplied by the Environmental Protection Agency, Greenpeace has concluded that the actual energy consumption of cloud computing is 1.3 times greater than intimated by the Smart 2020 study.

 

Greenpeace’s concerns focus on the fact that should this situation remain unchecked, and with most data centers around the globe using fossil fuels, cloud computing could lead to a real cloud of pollution, revealing that at current growth rates data centers and networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020. This is more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.

 

If considered as a country, global telecommunications and data centers behind cloud computing would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use in 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan, it concluded

 

The report highlights the data center expansion plans of several global giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple and appears somewhat critical that few of these highlighted companies appear to have pursued renewable energy for their power supply at their facilities.

 

“The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power,” said Greenpeace.

 

The cloud, argues Greenpeace, may be the fastest-growing facet of technology infrastructure between now and 2020, and requires its main exponents to innovate, increase energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lobby Government for a workable renewable energy agenda.

 

“The potential of ICT technologies and cloud computing to drive low-carbon economic growth underscore the importance of building cloud infrastructure in places powered by clean renewable energy. Companies like Facebook, Google, and other large players in the cloud computing market must advocate for policy change at the local, national and international levels to ensure that, as their appetite for energy increases, so does the supply of renewable energy.” concluded Greenpeace.

 

So are the arguments highlighted in the report valid? Will cloud computing lead to smog?

 

On the face of it this particular report is accurate, and no one can argue that Industry (not just the data center/technology industry) needs to address the issue of renewable energy and a move away from reliance on fossil fuels, but it could equally be argued that this report is somewhat ‘one eyed’ in its approach.

 

In an ideal world we would all use renewable energy sources but at the current moment in time this situation is idealistic. Most data center operators are utilising facilities that were built in less enlightened times and simply plug into the grid offered by their utility or power provider and are therefore often faced with ‘Hobson’s Choice’ as to the mix of fossil vs. renewable energy offered. Whilst companies with the financial clout of Google might be able to enter the power utility space, for many other cloud operators this is simply not an option.

 

One recognises that the Greenpeace, with its wholly admirable intentions in issuing this report, is seeking leadership from the global IT giants in its bid to move renewable energy up the public agenda, but it should also recognise that the DC industry as a whole, not just the IT super powers, is generally aware of its responsibilities and is genuinely seeking to reduce its impact where it can.

 

In the report, Greenpeace claims that seeking energy efficiency, whilst to be commended, is not enough but for many smaller operators, faced with legacy builds, it is a start and a major one.

 

It is an undeniable fact that the raw energy consumed by the data center is both the biggest financial cost overhead and is easily the largest contributor to the facility’s carbon footprint. But whilst acknowledging that power supply is obviously vital, there are many other major considerations to take into account when building out a new DC facility – internet/network connectivity being one rather important one for example.  

 

The report correctly claims that Cloud computing is growing, and so too are the data centers that are supporting its growth, but what it does not appear to mention is the overall net effect on energy consumption  as disparate server farms are closed and replaced by moving business processes to the cloud. Many companies taking advantage of the benefits of the cloud are effectively outsourcing their existing IT infrastructure and no longer have a need to own or maintain servers.

 

Logic would suggest that one hundred companies ridding themselves of their own in-house maintained and cooled servers in exchange for utilising one single cloud operator’s infrastructure would lead to an overall reduction in carbon emissions. Analysts at IDC estimate that for every $1.00 spent on new hardware, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling. By implementing a more efficient cooling solution e.g. a single DC rather than a 100 server rooms, fitted with the latest cooling technology, the amount of energy consumed must be reduced.

 

Even acknowledging the tough current economic conditions, it is no surprise that IDC reckons that in 2009 the overall server market declined by 18.9 per cent as many companies consolidated and outsourced their computing requirements.

 

In addition to the physical building and plant economies of scale that cloud computing offers, much effort is currently being expended by cloud providers on the utilisation of virtualisation technologies within the DC.  The cloud service provider can add real value here through scale and through the dedicated technological expertise offered. Underpowered virtual servers can fail to meet an organization’s processing needs, and over-engineered systems can waste money and energy. There is also a real potential for server sprawl to occur with a badly planned and implemented virtualisation project but this is mitigated when handled on a purpose built cloud platform.

 

Likewise the use of “energy proportional” operational techniques is growing amongst cloud service providers, which basically manages ‘spikey’ computing power activity - from idle to peak load - at its most energy efficient.

 

And of course we shouldn’t over look the fact that the very nature of cloud computing can lead to other environmental benefits as well, the web applications hosted in a data center may allow thousands of people to telecommute instead of travelling to offices and meetings thus reducing the carbon footprint further.

 

If we are to truly assist the environment by building greener data centers - and given that it has also been said that the ‘greenest data center is the one that we don’t have to build’ - we need to pursue a holistic approach which looks at every aspect of the services that the cloud offers not just the raw power supply.

 

If utilised effectively, cloud computing offers organisations the opportunity to reduce their energy consumption, renewable or otherwise, and surely overall energy reduction rather than energy replacement is a long term goal that will be of benefit to everyone.