The Surprising Environmental Impact of Hybrid Cloud Solutions

One of the unsung benefits of moving to a hybrid cloud platform is the impact on your organization’s sustainability efforts. Microsoft Azure’s data centers are 83% more carbon efficient than traditional data centers. Google Cloud is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2030. AWS aims to be 100% renewable by 2035. Generally, cloud data centers are far more energy efficient and sustainable than the traditional behemoths enterprises have been relying on for decades, so switching to hybrid cloud solutions can be positive for the enterprise and the planet. Yet we also track exactly how much our platform impacts sustainability for our customers.

At Nasuni, we annually conduct an internal analysis of the environmental impact of our software solutions. Our studies show that the shift from legacy infrastructure to Nasuni hybrid cloud storage saves 75,000 to 85,000 tons of CO₂ emissions annually across all of our customers. On average, organizations reduce CO₂ emissions by 60-70% when they adopt our hybrid cloud platform, and one global pharmaceutical company cut its unstructured-data-related emissions by a whopping 80%, largely by shrinking their hardware footprint. Once they’d upgraded to Nasuni, they exited 7 data centers and retired 83 Windows File Servers. Eliminating all that energy-hungry infrastructure was a major boost to their sustainability efforts.

As part of Nasuni’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, we’re working to track our impact and improve our own energy efficiency on a regular basis. During one analysis a few years ago, we realized that a key target area for improvement was the intelligent services Nasuni runs in the cloud — the brains of the platform’s operations behind the scenes. By optimizing these services and using more sustainable cloud compute options, we have been able to lower the associated carbon emissions by 95%. These operations are now generating under 500kg of CO₂ emissions annually, or 89% less than the standard automobile.

All sustainability initiatives take hard work and constant monitoring. At Nasuni, together with our customers and the cloud providers, we will continue to search for ways to improve the energy efficiency of our hybrid cloud solutions. Our goal is to deliver a scalable, secure, fast hybrid cloud storage platform that helps our customers reach all their operational, economic, and sustainability goals.

If you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into the subject, we created an ESG-focused white paper for our current and prospective customers, which is available here.