The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has been released as a comprehensive new study that outlines and predicts Cloud Computing business models as the IT solution of the 21^st century. The report serves as a forecast study to assess the financial and sustainability benefits for a company that is opting for cloud computing services, such as infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. It states that as companies fully utilize the Cloud services, a total of $12.3 billion will be saved in energy costs and 85.7 metric tonnes of CO2 will be reduced annually by the year 2020.

“The carbon emissions-reducing potential of cloud computing is a thrilling breakthrough, allowing companies to maximize performance, drive down costs, reduce inefficiency and minimize energy use – and therefore carbon emissions – all at the same time.” CDP executive chairman Paul Dickinson

This is big news as the Department of Energy indicates that data centres may be consuming 3% of total North American electricity today. This report forecasts that companies are planning to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing from a current 10% to 69% of their IT spend by 2020.

In essence, the traditional IT model that houses and manages infrastructure in a dedicated office server room is largely being dismissed and replaced by a consolidated Cloud model.

Along with the well-documented environmental impacts, many other advantages are clear:

Efficiency – enables companies to provide new services and server capacity at the drop of a hat.

Cost-Savings- the dedicated IT model is costly with labour, maintenance, and energy consumption considerations. The Cloud model consolidates and makes better use of hardware and helps to lower the cost of support and IT resources.

Scalability-Pay as you go and as you grow. Most Cloud services only require business to pay for the capacity used, reducing costs overall.

Cloud Computing is the IT investment of the future, and that’s good news for growing businesses in this economy and the prospective of environmental sustainability.

(Read the full CDP Project Report and Case Studies)

In business, it is part of the job to look ahead, forecast for the future and be prepared for a changing landscape. The people with the corner offices are paid the big bucks to make these predictions and lead their companies to success.

What does the future of your business look like?

Here’s a window into the future of our business, Cloud Services and IaaS:

Recently, Gartner released a research report stating that Cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) will make up 25% of overall hosting market share by the end of 2011. Infrastructure as a Service has flourished and become more and more attractive as a service for start-ups to enterprise businesses worldwide. It allows all hardware architectures to be virtualized, including processors, storage, firewalls and other network resources by cloud service providers. Often, it is provided as on-demand and/or pay-as-you-use plan to clients, which is appealing in both efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

According to an In-Stat report, IaaS is destined to grow quickly over the next four years, culminating in a $4 billion market by 2015. While implementing an IaaS plan will save large enterprise businesses huge costs in maintenance, network administration, energy budget and labour, “Infrastructure-as-a-service is also gaining traction, especially in the small business market.” (In-Stat)

Additional data concludes:

• Overall public cloud computing (IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS) is set to grow 153% from 2010 to 2015.
• Small business (5 to 99 employees) is the fastest growing size segment growing from $2.5 billion by 2010 to $6.6 billion by 2015.
• Small business account for over half of the market in SaaS and IaaS.
• The top 5 vertical markets for IaaS in terms of 2011 market revenue will be hospitality and food, healthcare and social services, and retail trade.  The bottom 5 verticals will be mining, forestry, fishing, and agricultural services and utilities.

Resource: http://www.instat.com/press

By all accounts, Cloud Services and particularly IaaS are set to take off in the very near future mainly because it offers businesses big and small a cost-effective, efficient and practical way to manage and build on their infrastructure.

The Cloud isn’t clearing any time soon.