Sorry mate, you are delusional. If a company can carbon offset by throwing their resources into someone elses datacenter (ie, the cloud), then they will do it just so it doesn't appear on their books, ie, make it someone else's problem. Do you really think cloud providers have sustainability in mind? There's only one thing they care about, and that's money. The cracks started appearing in the cloud a few years ago, and many companies are now finally waking up to the extortionate costs and restrictive controls of operating in the cloud, which are only increasing. There are some benefits (scalability etc), but at a cost, and nobody ever saves money moving to the cloud (our companies SaaS subscription costs have absolutely skyrocketed, because we have no choice these days). The cloud is a money machine, which attracted many cloud startups like flies round sh*t as they jostled to get their nose's in the trough, but it won't last.
I don't think anyone will disagree that cloud providers are out to make a profit. Also, I haven't come across companies choosing to migrate or start using public cloud providers solely for the ability to offset carbon impacts on their books. The drivers here vary for each organization, but sustainability typically isn't a primary driving factor toward the cloud. What you mention here would be more of a cloud vs. on-premises discussion. The pros/cons, business objectives (current and future) , and a complete TCO of both sides of the coin must be considered to make the best decision for a given organization. As for startups, cloud enables many companies to get off the ground with minimal capital investment. I don't think many startups would even exist today without the ability to leverage public cloud provider services. Investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in data center facilities and all the IT equipment and staff to support it would be prohibitive to getting many business ideas off the ground. Then what if that business idea fails? With cloud, you just shut down the resources you're using. Alternatively, you're stuck with tens of thousands of dollars or more in IT equipment to sell off at a fraction of the initial costs and have long-term contracts with vendors and facilities to address. For more established companies with particular steady-state use cases, it may make sense to have on-premises IT equipment and/or operate in a hybrid cloud model to achieve the benefits of both operating models. This TCO gets complex, and the right answer here varies for each company or particular workload. You have great points, but long story short, the value organizations get from using public cloud options varies greatly. As for this video and the sustainability topic, the main point here, which may have been missed (more videos to come on all this for more clarity), is that if you're already using public cloud today, how organizations can help lower their scope 3 carbon impacts, as well as reducing costs in the process by optimizing the use of these services. There is a lot companies can do to optimize their cloud utilization which can greatly reduce their "skyrocketing" costs and drive better value out of their cloud spend. In terms of cloud providers having sustainability in mind, here are a few examples: - aws.amazon.com/sustainability/ - azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability - cloud.google.com/sustainability - www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/
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Sorry mate, you are delusional. If a company can carbon offset by throwing their resources into someone elses datacenter (ie, the cloud), then they will do it just so it doesn't appear on their books, ie, make it someone else's problem. Do you really think cloud providers have sustainability in mind? There's only one thing they care about, and that's money. The cracks started appearing in the cloud a few years ago, and many companies are now finally waking up to the extortionate costs and restrictive controls of operating in the cloud, which are only increasing. There are some benefits (scalability etc), but at a cost, and nobody ever saves money moving to the cloud (our companies SaaS subscription costs have absolutely skyrocketed, because we have no choice these days). The cloud is a money machine, which attracted many cloud startups like flies round sh*t as they jostled to get their nose's in the trough, but it won't last.
I don't think anyone will disagree that cloud providers are out to make a profit. Also, I haven't come across companies choosing to migrate or start using public cloud providers solely for the ability to offset carbon impacts on their books. The drivers here vary for each organization, but sustainability typically isn't a primary driving factor toward the cloud. What you mention here would be more of a cloud vs. on-premises discussion. The pros/cons, business objectives (current and future) , and a complete TCO of both sides of the coin must be considered to make the best decision for a given organization.
As for startups, cloud enables many companies to get off the ground with minimal capital investment. I don't think many startups would even exist today without the ability to leverage public cloud provider services. Investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in data center facilities and all the IT equipment and staff to support it would be prohibitive to getting many business ideas off the ground. Then what if that business idea fails? With cloud, you just shut down the resources you're using. Alternatively, you're stuck with tens of thousands of dollars or more in IT equipment to sell off at a fraction of the initial costs and have long-term contracts with vendors and facilities to address.
For more established companies with particular steady-state use cases, it may make sense to have on-premises IT equipment and/or operate in a hybrid cloud model to achieve the benefits of both operating models. This TCO gets complex, and the right answer here varies for each company or particular workload.
You have great points, but long story short, the value organizations get from using public cloud options varies greatly. As for this video and the sustainability topic, the main point here, which may have been missed (more videos to come on all this for more clarity), is that if you're already using public cloud today, how organizations can help lower their scope 3 carbon impacts, as well as reducing costs in the process by optimizing the use of these services. There is a lot companies can do to optimize their cloud utilization which can greatly reduce their "skyrocketing" costs and drive better value out of their cloud spend.
In terms of cloud providers having sustainability in mind, here are a few examples:
- aws.amazon.com/sustainability/
- azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability
- cloud.google.com/sustainability
- www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/