CDP Study Shows Cloud Computing Saves Green AND Is Green

The Carbon Disclosure Project recently released a study that provides some interesting numbers on the sustainability of utilizing cloud computing (both economically and environmentally). The study was conducting using 11 global firms as case studies, including two Workday customers: Aviva and Applied Materials.

Key findings:

• Cloud computing can avoid millions of metric tons of CO2
• Potential financial benefits from cloud computing run into $ billions
• Cloud computing delivers a postive net present value (NPV)
  
• Cloud computing brings business efficiency savings

To illustrate, they build a hypothetical scenario of a large global firm moving their HR application to the public cloud (e.g. Workday HCM). They found that this would save $12 million over five years and cut CO2 emissions by 30,000 metric tons - the equivalent of taking 5,900 cars off the road for a year!

The overall results show that by 2020, "large U.S. companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil – enough to power 5.7 million cars for one year."

This is great news for Workday customers and confirms what we've known for a while now: SaaS Is Green!