Is the cloud always more sustainable?

The move to cloud media workflows has been gaining pace. While the main benefits of moving to cloud are generally cited as cost-efficiencies, flexibility, and scalability, there has been a growing argument of its sustainability. As the media industry becomes increasingly sustainability-conscious, is the cloud the answer to doing our bit for the planet?

On prem versus cloud

Historically, the video industry hasn’t been very much concerned about sustainability. Traditional workflows with large on-premise hardware, poor scalability and huge demands on processing power are of course adding to that. Over recent months the video industry has begun to look more seriously at becoming more sustainable. While there could be some arguments that the transition to the cloud is having a positive impact, it is challenging to determine just how much that is helping.

There are various reports, though mainly from the main cloud providers, that would suggest the potential for significant energy savings by moving to the cloud. A report commissioned by Microsoft cites its cloud between 22 and 93 percent more energy-efficient than traditional enterprise data centers. Meanwhile AWS claims to be 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the median of the surveyed US enterprise data centers and have an 88% lower carbon footprint than enterprise data centers.

There does seem to be some evidence to back up this claim and it stands to reason. Broadcasting requires a huge amount of infrastructure and traditional on-premise setups involve large racks of equipment sitting on site, which is of course all consuming vast amounts of energy. There are two main arguments for why cloud is more sustainable than on-premise. Firstly, cloud is much more scalable. Cloud services have processes that will enhance server usage to the maximum by leveraging demand from their multiple customers. At the same time the cloud model of pay per use also encourages more sustainable consumption, as any unnecessary workflows would incur cost, and in turn energy consumption. The other major argument is that the biggest cloud providers in our industry are running on renewable energy, if not fully, then close to it, as we will discuss later.

However, despite that, it is not as simple as saying the cloud solves that as it of course still requires energy-hungry data centers. It may be less energy-consuming than most on-premise solutions but it is not, by itself, enough to make the video industry sustainable or carbon neutral. To achieve that, we need further commitment from the cloud providers to become much more sustainable.

Commitment to renewable energy

One thing is for certain, the cloud providers do at least seem to be taking sustainability seriously. As mentioned, most have at least begun the transition to renewable energy and have also set out commitments to increase that over the coming years.

In 2021, Google Cloud claims to have been the only major cloud provider to match 100% of the electricity consumption of its operations with renewable energy purchases. It aims to be operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Microsoft Azure is also planning to shift 100% of its supply to renewable energy by 2025. Similarly, Amazon Web Services says it reached 85% renewable energy in 2021 and announced renewable energy projects across 18 countries.

They are not there yet but this is a really important step in the right direction. Indeed, if these giants all operate with 100% renewable energy, then suddenly the difference between on-prem and cloud becomes even more pronounced. That said, it is still not enough to claim we have a sustainable industry.

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Renewable energy isn’t the holy grail

There is no doubt that switching to renewable energy is a huge leap forward. However, even these energy sources produce emissions (albeit much less than ozone depleting sources) that need to be reduced if the industry is to at least achieve Net Zero (reducing emissions as much as possible and offsetting the essential emissions that remain). There are already some initiatives in place aimed at helping in this area. One example is the move to push video content to a server that is closer to the user. This reduces both cost and emissions, as well as of course reducing latency. The fact that many things that will reduce emissions come with other benefits will make it much easier to get these implemented.

Ideally, as an industry, we should be aiming further still and working towards climate neutral (net zero but also making sure we are not contributing to any other negative impacts on the environment) or even carbon negative (where we are removing more carbon than we emit). All of that will of course take time and a lot of collaboration.

Tracking emissions

The biggest stumbling block by far is that it is very difficult to track emissions from cloud usage and the cloud providers are not making this easy. Our experience with Amazon Web Services sees data available with a three-month delay, which means that it takes three months to see the impact of any changes you make and that is just not quick enough. Not only that, but data is also extremely high-level, only focusing on a handful of services. Without a breakdown of data, it is also difficult to evaluate any areas for improving the carbon impact. I know that experiences with other cloud providers vary slightly but are broadly similar.

We are currently working with Humans Not Robots to plug the gap of this data so that we can get a timely and accurate view of our carbon impact for services in the cloud. That is really helping us, but it is something that the cloud providers should be providing themselves. While the figures might currently not be as favorable as perhaps they would like, having much more transparency will enable everyone throughout the chain, including the cloud providers, to improve for a more sustainable video environment.

François Polarczyk, AccedoFrançois Polarczyk is the Sustainability Director at Accedo, a video SaaS platform that enables endusers to create OTT applications.