Quantifying the cloud’s consumption

Rather than using local storage units and requiring employees to work on site, most companies have turned to the cloud: a network of remote servers that can be accessed over the internet. It’s a shared infrastructure that, as of now, is thought to be a more sustainable option than traditional means of storage. But how much of that notion is based in reality versus wishful thinking? FEED set out to find out.

Sustainable storage

The cloud offers a number of benefits on-site storage doesn’t: scalability, flexibility and, above all, a shared infrastructure. “Instead of organisations running underutilised servers in isolation, cloud platforms pool compute and storage across many users,” says Lee Otterway, commercial director at Dot Group. “This allows systems to run closer to capacity and scale resources up or down as demand changes, reducing the over-provisioning that often occurs in fixed environments.”

“In media and entertainment, archive environments are often designed for peak demand rather than everyday use,” adds Brian Campanotti, digital transformation visionary at Cloudfirst.io. “Rather than running continuously, a shared model can reduce the amount of idle infrastructure required to support large archives.”

In theory, the cloud reduces wasted energy, instead optimising cooling, efficiency and the overall consumption. “Cloud providers,” Campanotti believes, “are investing heavily in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure.” (More on that later.) Amazon Web Services, for example, hopes to hit net-zero carbon by 2040, and research by Accenture indicates that AWS’s infrastructure is around four times more efficient than private data centres.

“That said,” Otterway clarifies, “the cloud isn’t automatically sustainable. Idle instances, inefficient workloads or unnecessary data movement can still create waste.”

Whether the cloud is efficient depends on how the data centres are run. “Simply moving workloads to the cloud isn’t enough,” argues Campanotti. So, what can we do?

Carbon footprint: Querying the standard

Companies can monitor and manage energy consumption, particularly as it relates to the cloud, by measuring their carbon footprint – or, at least, that has become the commonly accepted metric.

Around 2014, academics at Bristol University were studying the energy impact of the cloud, linking gigabytes of data with kilograms of carbon. “That had taken off as the way to measure sustainability: the carbon impact of digital services,” explains Dom Robinson, chief business development officer at id3as and Norsk. He is also founder of Greening of Streaming, which is a member organisation that works to minimise the streaming industry’s environmental impact, with a growing number of organisations involved.

Companies like Google, Microsoft and AWS offer carbon footprint trackers to customers, allowing them to measure, report and hopefully reduce their energy consumption. AWS’s Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, for instance, “estimates the emissions associated with a customer’s cloud usage,” says Otterway. However, since these figures aren’t exact, he notes that “there is an ongoing discussion in the industry about transparency and how accurately they reflect real-world energy use.”

The problem with measuring the cloud’s carbon footprint – at least for individual companies – is that it’s a shared service, and it’s “always on,” says Robinson. It’d be like trying to quantify how much air you’re breathing in a crowded room. “The power demanded by infrastructure isn’t down to its use; it’s down to how much is available. The consumer feels responsible, but all this infrastructure is outside of their control.”

The tech companies running the data centres are in the driver’s seat, and it’s important to recognise the conflicts of interest at play, especially when they publish climate reports or offer tracking tools. “It’s like the tobacco industry defining the measurements of cancer,” suggests Robinson – and while it’s an extreme analogy, it hammers the point.

He offers a different approach to measurement: “We’ve got Wi-Fi plugs, and you can read data from them. We can run real-time live streams, see how different people are affected and correlate the data.”

Robinson, like Otterway, claims that the existing measurement tools do not offer an accurate representation of the cloud’s energy consumption. Rather, he says: “This kind of carbon calculator reporting has lost sight of its purpose, which is to use less energy, and there’s too much economic force against that.”

Roadblocks and best efforts

In the era of climate activism, it’s essential that companies put sustainability at the head of their priority lists – only without making any false promises. While lessening energy consumption is a lofty (and one might argue unattainable) goal, every effort still counts.

The first and easiest step is to only use what you need. “Our team works remotely,” says Campanotti, “and we no longer maintain internal hardware environments for development or testing, relying instead on cloud resources.”

The next step is to audit your energy consumption. “Once that data exists, you can start optimising workloads, reducing idle resources and making smarter decisions about where and how compute runs, which reduces both carbon and cost,” suggests Otterway.

After this, the third step is to partner with providers who promote social responsibility – even if their strategies are imperfect. Amazon claims to have built the largest carbon-free energy portfolio of any corporation, adding that same energy to the shared power grid. The company is also committed to water positivity by 2030 – in other words, returning more water to the environment than what is used. As of 2024, they had already made strides in achieving that goal, particularly by minimising the amount of water used for cooling.

Renewable energy sources are also a step in the right direction, with wind turbines, solar panels and hydropower plants already in place around the world. Unfortunately, though, as Robinson points out, there are ‘political blockers’ which prevent those sources from serving their full potential, including those lobbying for shareholder interests. In a world dominated by financial concerns more than anything else, sustainability can fall by the wayside.

That said, consumers seem to be more aware of the environment and their role in preserving it. “Media organisations are beginning to ask how their archive strategies impact energy consumption and long-term infrastructure demand,” offers Campanotti. While most of the power still rests with the cloud providers and the energy companies serving them, organisations are not completely powerless either.

“We’ve got a good critical mass of people at Greening of Streaming,” says Robinson. “Somebody has to do the empirical work to go, ‘Is this really right?’” Until there’s a solid understanding of how to quantify the cloud’s energy consumption,
all we can do is our best.

This article appeared in our NAB 2026 issue