The Green IT Guide: Ten Steps Toward Sustainable and Carbon-Neutral IT Infrastructure

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022

M. HalseyThe Green IT Guidehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8057-7_4

4. Appraising Cloud Services and Climate Change

Mike Halsey¹  

(1)

Genouillac, France

 

We’ve all got our heads stuck in the clouds somewhere. From something as straightforward as using Microsoft of Google email, or OneDrive or Dropbox file backup and sync, to systems such as Teams or Zoom for chat and collaboration, we’re using cloud services that are powered by huge data centers, and we have been doing so now for a couple of decades at least.

Back in the early days of data centers, there was no incentive to try and tackle energy usage and emissions to combat climate change, as that wasn’t ...