The greenhouse gas abatement potential of enterprise cloud computing

In this paper we present a dynamic, country level model and methodology to determine the energy related Green House Gas (GHG) abatement potential of cloud computing. The methodology presented includes variables for market penetration, organisation size and organisational adoption of on-premise and cloud computing. Using the current enterprise cloud service applications of email, customer relationship management (CRM) and groupware against selected global countries we have calculated that 4.5 million tonnes of CO2e could be reduced with an 80% market penetration. The majority of savings were calculated to be from small and medium size organisations. A sensitivity analysis of the market penetration and current organisational cloud adoption highlights the possible large variability in overall energy and GHG reductions. An analysis of the model and data used within this study illustrates a requirement for industry and academia to work closely in order to reach the large energy reductions possible with enterprise cloud computing.