Is it really Greener in the Cloud? An investigation of energy trends in Cloud Computing.

摘要

Cloud computing has become a popular method of IT deployment in the last decade, most visibly through the rise of online services and social media. Recent reports claim that businesses can achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by shifting their processes to the cloud. These studies do not consider the change in user interaction with data when it is in the cloud, such as through mobile devices. This paper investigates this energy-saving claim by reviewing trends in and between four domains of this problem and identifying their key drivers in a business setting. These domains considered are on-site computing, cloud infrastructure, data transport, and device adoption. By mapping a causal loop diagram to explain how the dominant trends are linked between these domains, we conclude that overall energy consumption is likely increase when moving computing processes to the cloud.