Green Cloud Computing and Economics of the Cloud: Moving towards Sustainable Future

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing
services, it is becoming more and more important for cloud
service providers to ensure that they fulfill their responsibility
towards the society by minimizing the environmental impact of
their business operations. The high electricity needs of
datacenters make cloud computing companies consume an
extremely large amount of electricity. To deal with this issue,
these companies are starting to adopt renewable sources of
energy to power their datacenters for reducing the negative
environmental impact. The purpose of this paper is to review the
green Cloud and economic benefits of green Cloud. Therefore, it
has been found that dynamic provisioning, multi-tenancy, server
utilization and datacenter efficiency are major factors that could
be used to minimize the power consumption while increasing
environmental sustainability. The paper concludes that (a)
economical viability of green Cloud adoption, (b) the location
datacenter that needs to be considered during green Cloud
adoption, (c) the utility providers that provide green energy at
competitive prices, and (d) the generation of energy at on-site will
be costly, but mixes of energy sources such as wind and coal will
cost companies 13% more.