Why cloud solutions could help your business reduce its energy costs

04 Oct 2022

Published in: Member News

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Learn how cloud services can benefit your business .whilst reducing your energy costs during the energy crisis.

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With the hike in energy costs this autumn and winter, many businesses are having to find new ways to reduce their electricity consumption across the board.

Previously, most businesses have probably not been particularly focused on the running costs associated with their on-premises hardware and software. Your business may not even have looked into exactly how much you are spending on electricity to run your servers 24 hours a day, as well as the lighting and air-conditioning needed to keep everything at the right temperature. However, the amount of energy required to power this equipment represents a sizeable overhead. One way of reducing your costs is by moving from an on-premises IT infrastructure to a cloud solution, which could decrease your energy consumption significantly and could save you money.

Benefits of cloud over on-premises IT

If you have an on-premises IT infrastructure, your organisation’s electricity costs are likely to increase substantially due to the amount of energy required to run all of your software. Moving your storage to the cloud and outsourcing to a specialist cloud provider will allow you to transfer the responsibility of running your own hardware and software over to your provider.

According to Microsoft Corporation and WSP Global Inc., cloud computing is 93% more energy-efficient than on-premises data centres. Furthermore, research by Berkeley Lab and Northwestern University, funded by Google, found that businesses could save between 60% and 85% in energy costs when they change over to cloud-based services.

Due to the current energy crisis, the supply of energy may become unstable, particularly over the winter, with the possibility of blackouts in the worst case scenario. If this does happen, a cloud provider is more likely to have better resilience in terms of back-up generators and equipment, ensuring your business stays working.

How do cloud providers keep costs down?

As specialist cloud providers are dealing with numerous customers, the cost of the energy that they are using to run their servers is shared between their customers so they benefit from economies of scale. They are also likely to get wholesale energy rates which means their energy will be less costly per unit than the average business. Since their business is IT, they will be more likely to be using the latest energy efficient servers within their data centre.

Different types of cloud services

Private cloud hosting Private cloud hosting provides the best security and compliance in terms of cloud solutions as it runs on hardware dedicated to your organisation, meaning that there are no shared resources. Private cloud computing has the has all of the advantages of cloud computing but with the added benefits of extra security, access control, and resource customisation of on-premises infrastructure in a private cloud.

Hybrid cloud hosting

Hybrid cloud hosting provides your organisation with a blend of cloud and on-premises resources. One of the key benefits of using hybrid cloud is that it enables organisations to move their workloads and data between onsite, private and public clouds with ease. This provides a high level of flexibility, with data and workloads often being moved as requirements and costs change. This gives your company or organisation a wider range of options on data deployment and usage.

Managed cloud services

Managed cloud services offer a fully managed, multi-tenanted cloud solution which delivers high performance, reliability and scalability. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a proven way to minimize IT costs while maximizing scalability, security, uptime and resilience. However, the complexity involved around the design, migration and deployment and day-to-day management requires both a high level of technical expertise and resource. This complexity is one reason organisations are increasingly turning to a managed IaaS.

Enterprise cloud services

Enterprise cloud services provide the perfect solution for organisations wanting the scale of a global cloud provider alongside the assurance of a fully managed service. An enterprise solution is provided through a partnership between a cloud provider and a global hosting provider and offers a competitive alternative for enterprise level organisations that are considering using cloud services such as Azure or AWS.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Security

Cyber security is paramount for every business. Hosting through your own servers may not be fully secure. With cloud hosting, your network, sensitive data and applications are protected by multiple layers of security including backup and recovery, firewalls, encryption.

Accessibility

Cloud hosting enables your employees to work and collaborate more easily as they have the ability to access and edit the same documents and files. This means that employees can work flexibly, access files instantaneously and get their work done faster.

Scalable

Cloud services also provide businesses with greater flexibility as they can scale and allocate resources as they wish. Bandwidth and storage can be reduced or increased in line with your business needs allowing you to expand your resources as you go along.

Cost saving

Cloud hosting allows you to pay a fixed amount to manage your IT infrastructure so you don’t have to spend extra on additional resources like servers, you just pay for the services you use. This can also be helpful when it comes to budgeting.

Efficiency

Cloud solutions enable employees to access files faster and work collaboratively on projects, wherever they are. This leads to increased productivity and efficiency across your business. Employees’ downtime is also reduced as all of your documents and services are stored off-site, so if your systems go down at the office, your employees can still access their work.

Moving to the cloud reduces the amount of hardware your business requires, lowers your energy consumption and saves your business money so it is certainly worth considering making the move before the next energy price increase hits.

At EBC Group, we provide the full range of cloud hosting services including private cloud hosting, hybrid cloud hosting, managed cloud services and enterprise cloud services. Our cloud solutions will substantially reduce your capital spend, as you only pay for what you use, meaning your costs are determined by your business needs. EBC Group will help you explore all of the cloud options available to you and assess what will work best for your business, whether that is hosting a few of your systems with us or all of them. Our primary data centre is located in the BT Tower, the third largest communication hub in the UK, which allows us to monitor your network 24/7 and proactively safeguard your data and systems as well as provide the best connectivity, resilience, and latency.

For more information, contact us online, email us at hello@ebcgroup.co.uk or call us on 0121 3680119.