Sustainability is becoming one of the most important topics for financial industry consumers.  For all the joys and conveniences of electronic banking, there is a hidden cost attached to each transaction: emissions.  Nearly 369 billion purchases happen every day on electronic platforms, and each one might be polluting the environment.  The more relevant an issue climate change becomes, the more attention will be paid to this problem.

Both businesses and consumers want to move in a green direction.  60% of financial industry consumers are more likely to purchase sustainable services.  52% of banks see environmental concerns as an emerging risk over the next 5 years.  Green trend adoption is no longer a feature; it is turning into a necessity for survival.  Nearly every CEO agrees that sustainability issues are critical to the survival of a successful business.  However, 65% also said that while they want to make a difference in sustainability efforts, they aren’t sure how to do it.  Only 36% of those survey have quantifiable ways to measure the success of their sustainability initiatives.  For an industry that loves assigning monetary value and numbers to every action, this is an incredible oversight.

Let cloud computing be the start of the solution.  People don’t typically turn to the cloud for its environmental benefits, but cloud services can help reduce greenhouse gasses in a number of ways.  To start, cloud data centers use less energy than traditional, on-premise data centers do.  They can do more with less.  Additionally, the cloud’s virtualization of physical machines means that the high-carbon physical equivalent of a machine does not need to be built.  Finally, cloud services are more flexible in function than previous generations, reducing the harmful effects of decommissioned servers, networking equipment, and racks in a landfill.  The cloud can divert up to 81% of waste from a landfill. 

To put some numbers on the cloud’s ability to reduce carbon emissions, migrations to the cloud can bring global emissions down by 59 million metric tons every year.  That is a 5.9% reduction in total IT emissions, equivalent to pulling 22 million cars off the road.  From 2021 to 2024, the transition to cloud computing is on track to save 629 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.  Companies drive even greater carbon reductions through enabling cloud-native architectures and deployments.  Another way to compound emission reductions is by strategic placement of the cloud’s physical location.  Because cloud services don’t have to be located near the businesses they serve, cloud data centers can take advantage of the places with the greenest energy grids.  Google Cloud has already seized upon this opportunity.  The company is working towards 24/7 carbon-free energy for its cloud services by 2030.  For grids where the energy source can switch between renewable and non-renewable, Google shifts its flexible computing tasks to times when the power on the grid is cleanest.  In 2020, 10 years pre-goal, Google achieved 67% round-the-clock carbon free energy across all of their data centers.