I gave the keynote address at the Digital Trends 2011 event organised by HePIS and CEPIS in Athens recently. My talk was on Cloud Computing’s Green Potential and in my presentation, I claimed that Cloud Computing is NOT Green.
I started the talk by explaining what Cloud Computing is and the many advantages it can bring to companies. However, because none of the Cloud providers are publishing energy figures around Cloud computing, we can’t say whether or not Cloud computing is energy efficient.
I went on to point out that even if Cloud is energy efficient (and we have no proof that it is), that is not the same thing as being Green.
My slides are available on my SlideShare account and a transcript of my talk is here:
Okay, so my talk this morning is on Cloud Computing and its Green Potential. So a quick couple of words about myself.
So my name is Tom Raftery, I work for an industry analyst firm called RedMonk. My area of interest within RedMonk or the area I specialize in is energy and sustainability. We have termed the practice within RedMonk that concentrates on energy and sustainability GreenMonk. So the place that I blog at is at GreenMonk.net.
And a little bit about my past. I worked in an organization called Zenith Solutions back in the 90s and early 2000s, and Zenith Solutions was a software company creating what has now become termed cloud applications. At that time we called them web applications, they were web based software with the database backend online.
Then I worked for a company called Chip Electronics in the early 2000s and Chip Electronics was again a company which created Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP applications which were cloud delivered, at the time we called it Software as a Service. No at the time we called it active service provisions, since become Software as a Service. And I am also a co-founder and Director of CIX, which is a hyper energy efficient data center based in Cork in Ireland. So I know both from the hardware side and the software side.
I mentioned my blog on GreenMonk.net, I am on Twitter and twitter.com/tomraftery. My email address is there, my mobile phone number is there, please don?t ring it now. And this site here, slideshare.net the last line there and I am sorry for the bullet points, I don?t normally use them, but I did just here and in one other slide. slideshare.net is a site where you can upload a presentations.
So, this presentation I am giving this morning, I uploaded it to SlideShare earlier this morning, so it?s already online there at that site and if you go there now you?ll see it has already been viewed over 277 times so far. So, it?s a great site for getting your talks out all available, it?s also downloadable there.
One thing you?ll notice as well about the structure of my talks is a lot of them have images like this, but they also have this bit of text at the bottom which you can?t read, don?t try right now, but what they are is those are links to the source material. So, if at any point you do download the presentation you can go and click on the links, they are clickable links you can click on them and see where I?ve got the information from.
So that?s me, who are you guys?
A couple of questions, so how many people here have deployed applications to the cloud? Not very many. How many plan to? A few more, okay. How many people here think that cloud computing is green? Okay, good few people. Right. I hope to burst that bubble, unlike Nancy who spoke just a minute ago, I am not a, I am not a believer that cloud computing is green and I hope to explain why. I am a huge fan of cloud computing, I have to say, I use it extensively, going back to the slide for a second.
The Chip application, the Zenith stuff, the GreenMonk, Twitter, SlideShare even my email are all cloud delivered. Our organization RedMonk we use Google applications for domains for our email, so my email is cloud delivered as well. So I am a big user of and believer in cloud for lots of things. But I just don?t happen to believe it?s green.
So what is cloud computing? Well at kind of first blush it?s software that?s delivered in a browser, so that?s a