Reducing Your Cloud Carbon Footprint in 2025: What IT Teams Need to Know

The rise of web applications and cloud services has significantly increased energy consumption across data centers, raising concerns about the environmental impact of digital infrastructure. As demand for cloud computing grows, so does the carbon footprint it leaves behind.

To address this, organizations can adopt strategies that optimize cloud usage, choose low-carbon providers, and monitor emissions tied to IT operations.

These actions not only help reduce environmental impact but also support broader sustainability goals, improve operational efficiency, and position companies as responsible, forward-thinking leaders in their industry.

Optimize cloud resource usage (rightsize):

Efficient workload optimization is key to minimizing energy consumption. By implementing load balancing techniques and automatic scaling mechanisms, organizations ensure that applications and services use resources efficiently. In addition, by identifying under-used instances and rightsizing them, companies can reduce their energy consumption, their cost, and, consequently, their carbon emissions linked to their cloud operations.

Consolidate resources:

Regroup your little-used services together on a common resource when possible.  When you identify instances that are under-used, whenever it is possible, reduce the number of active instances by grouping applications, services, and environments etc. together.

De-provision resources:

If you notice that there is no cloud computing activity outside certain hours in the day or week, set up automation or launch scripts to de-provision your resources when you can.  Then re-provision them shortly before they are solicited in anticipation of activity.  This is typically seen in web applications where there is no activity in the nighttime hours or on weekends.

Use cloud infrastructure with a favorable emission factor:

To tackle carbon emissions, companies need to work with cloud service providers who prioritize low-carbon and renewable energy sources. Opting for data centers powered by solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy reduces the carbon emissions associated with cloud services. By migrating to these low-carbon options, companies can effectively reduce their cloud carbon footprint. 

Prioritize data center location:

When choosing a cloud service provider, companies need to consider the location or region of their data centers. Opting for data centers located in regions with access to renewable energy sources and low-carbon location-based emission factors can significantly reduce carbon emissions. Check and understand the difference between “location-based” energy and “market-based” energy. By strategically choosing data center locations, companies can reduce their environmental impact while optimizing operational costs.

Implement server virtualization:

Server virtualization is a powerful technique that enables multiple virtual servers to run on a single physical server. This is another way to consolidate workloads and reduce the number of physical servers required, Server virtualization delivers significant energy savings. By collaborating with cloud service providers and datacenter virtualization software providers using virtualization technologies, companies can optimize resource utilization and reduce their cloud carbon footprint. This approach not only reduces energy consumption but also delivers cost savings and improved overall infrastructure performance.

Facilitate cloud-based collaboration and communication:

Using cloud-based collaboration and communication tools reduces the carbon footprint associated with employee travel and business trips. Video conferencing, document sharing and project management tools facilitate efficient collaboration while reducing environmental impact. By adopting these cloud-based solutions, companies can significantly reduce their carbon footprint and promote sustainable working practices.

Optimize and improve in real-time:

Reducing the cloud's carbon footprint is an ongoing process. Companies need to constantly monitor and optimize their cloud infrastructure, workloads, and resource allocation to identify opportunities for improvement. By regularly reassessing in real-time energy efficiency and carbon emissions, adopting the latest sustainable practices, and keeping abreast of technological advances, organizations stay at the forefront of IT sustainability.  Real-time tools also ensure that IT team members can implement their reduction actions themselves and stay in a virtuous loop of constant improvement.

Extend server life:

For enterprises with on-premise datacenters, increasing the number of years a server is used spreads the embodied (or construction carbon) emitted to manufacture the server over a longer period of time, and as a consequence, the current carbon attributed to a day’s use goes down.  This may seem like a mathematical trick, but considering that manufacturing a new server emits a large amount of carbon, the logic is simple.

Understand server hardware efficiency:

Not all cloud computing and datacenter servers are the same.  Older servers with older chip-sets/components and older operating systems tend to consume more energy and therefore emit more carbon.  Servers that were designed and manufactured very recently can benefit from the latest chipsets that tend to consume less energy, while at the same time providing more computing power and storage in a smaller form factor.   While it is generally recommended to keep hardware as long as possible, if your growth requires more hardware, be attentive to your real needs, look into recycled servers first, then choose energy-efficient servers and components if you have no other choice.

Move to datacenters with good power usage effectiveness:

Some datacenters are very energy efficient, they have good insulation, use low-carbon cooling systems, require few monitoring tools, with modern servers that consume less electricity to run, etc. However, not all datacenters are the same, some are poorly insulated, have older, inefficient servers, lots of monitoring equipment, and in this case, using them emits a lot more carbon into the atmosphere.  The Power Usage Effectiveness (PuE) indicator will tell you how efficient a data center is; the closer to 1, the better.

Adopt cloud-based carbon accounting tools:

To effectively manage and reduce their cloud carbon footprint, companies can seek out and use innovative cloud carbon footprint accounting tools. OxygenIT by ScaleDynamics takes into account emission factors, server lifetime, regional variations, and provides comprehensive information on energy consumption, cloud carbon emissions, and their costs associated with their actual cloud usage. By integrating with all the leading cloud providers, OxygenIT offers an organization its environmental impact and the broadest scope of coverage for the future.

OxygenIT enables companies to take into account all the aspects related to their cloud carbon footprint, i.e., their PuE, their location-based emission factor, their server HW components, etc. This is a monumental task in itself.  Then OxygenIT analyzes with high granularity the cloud carbon footprint of your specific workloads, applications, and regions, and then enables you to make informed decisions about your cloud infrastructure. With this tool, companies know their emissions, can set targets, track progress, and implement effective actions to minimize their cloud carbon footprint.