Greener Bytes: Making Sustainable Data Storage a Reality

By David Friend, CEO, President and Co-Founder, Wasabi Technologies

The rise of AI is contributing to a projected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030, which will significantly increase the demand for cloud storage. However, this expansion comes with higher energy consumption needed to process, compute, and store these data. The carbon footprints of generative AI tasks show that generating images with AI is energy-intensive, similar to charging a smartphone. This leads many organisations to seek sustainable cloud storage solutions.

For example, Google has reported a 48% increase in emissions since 2019, mainly attributed to AI’s energy demands. This puts businesses in a bind, trying to balance scalability with sustainability. Increasingly, sustainability is becoming a priority in decision-making processes.

The poor reputation of data centres’ energy consumption is pushing many organisations to ask about sustainability first when purchasing cloud storage.

In Wasabi’s 2024 Cloud Storage Index survey of IT decision-makers, sustainability now outweighs cost, scalability and performance as the most important factor when choosing a cloud storage provider. This shift highlights how vital sustainability has become for business leaders. Now it’s a matter of understanding what sustainable data use looks like, and if it’s possible.

Going green is a legal matter

Part of the reason board members are prioritising sustainability is because of the regulatory pressure to do so. Legal bodies across the globe are beginning to force businesses to take carbon emissions seriously or face legal repercussions. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data is being held to the same standards as financial data and companies will be held accountable for their impact on the planet.

With the regulatory landscape changing, businesses are having to adjust. According to Bain and Company, only 24% of executives feel they are prepared to comply with upcoming sustainability requirements. For many organisations, a lack of transparency from their third-party providers inhibits their ability to build a comprehensive picture of their climate impact. Tech vendors, including cloud providers, must deliver reliable tools, metrics, and programmes to help customers better identify their contribution to the overall carbon footprint. If cloud providers can put a number on the carbon footprint from a customer’s storage use, it’s added to the accounting of that organisation’s downstream environmental impact and can assist in establishing a more sustainable future for generations to come.   

As organisations strive to understand their climate impact, cloud providers need to offer transparent, reliable tools for measuring carbon footprints.

A transparent future is a sustainable future

Unfortunately, many of the hyperscalers in cloud storage are notorious for a lack of transparency. Recent reports have brought attention to how the largest energy consumers in tech are not revealing their true emission levels, although you wouldn’t know it from their communications and reporting. Big Tech takes advantage of the discrepancies in climate reporting; they can claim the label Net Zero through investments in various clean power schemes whilst still polluting millions of tonnes of CO2. But how are these offset strategies factored into their customers’ carbon footprint calculations?

Willingness to shed light on the back end aside, both the scale and age of their infrastructure makes it much more difficult to provide granular and sophisticated emissions reporting. If your storage provider is someone other than the big three hyperscalers, they are more likely able to point to the specific location in the specific data centre where your information is being stored and therefore know exactly how much power you are consuming. As we know sustainability is a key factor when choosing a cloud provider, customers are demanding transparency. The providers willing to work together with their customers to understand consumption and emissions will be the ones who succeed in the eco-conscious market of the future.

More sustainable than you think

In general, cloud storage gets a bad reputation when it comes to climate impact because of the energy consumption of data centres. While the electricity required to power cloud storage is undeniable, another important factor to consider within sustainability is waste. Cloud is the least wasteful storage solution because of its high optimisation of computing and storage capacity. Data centres allow us to do the most amount of work possible with a given amount of power. There is a strong incentive for any unused space in a data centre to be sold to a customer, therefore eliminating any wasted capacity. Consider that the average hard drive uses around 7 watts of power, regardless of whether the disk is full or empty— further to eliminating waste, high utilisation also improves energy efficiency.

This means that the bigger a data centre becomes, the more energy efficient it will be. Thanks to the economy of scale, by contributing to big data centres getting bigger you are bringing down the carbon footprint per terrabyte. Therefore, sustainable-minded cloud customers are best selecting the established competitor compared to the startups.

Today’s world is built around the digital economy; cloud storage is the best available option for powering the digital economy in a sustainable manner. As an immense amount of data is a non-negotiable for running a successful business and we need infrastructure to store and use it — data centres are here to stay. The focus instead should be on what is a justifiable use of the electricity and resources. When customers are constructing their sustainable-first storage strategy they must also ask themselves which workloads are worth the energy consumption. The role of the cloud provider is to meet that demand in the most sustainable and transparent manner possible.