A Fascinating show on BBC One Panorama - "Is the cloud damaging the planet?" Lots of powerful insights and statistics into how the cloud really operates - and the impact on the surrounding areas. The featured data centre in Norway, at full capacity, uses the same amount of electricity as more than 100,000 homes. At a time when local power cuts are becoming a realistic occurrence (my local area was notified of one 2 weeks ago), this is a sobering thought.
"The main thing you need to know about the cloud is it's greedy."
Richard Bilton
The most fascinating scene for me was the visual impact of the water shortage in the Colorado River. This shortage needs to be balanced with surrounding data centres that could use around a billion litres of water a year. And the demand for data centres is growing.
We've seen some strong initiatives from the cloud providers to try to balance the impact, but clearly, there is so much more that could be done. One of the driving factors here is growth and inefficiency. When everything was on-premise, the cost of inefficiency was more tangible - you could see it when you had to request thousands of pounds for new hardware earlier than you expected to, or when your power bills increased. But the flexibility of the cloud, which we all love, has caused laziness.
It's a bit like having your first credit card - how many of us overspent because the use of a card made your spending less tangible? To deal with this, we've had to develop a different mindset to money management.
Then you need to add growth into the mix. Because that causes those inefficiencies to get bigger, more intensive, more power-hungry and more costly with each new user. Richard Bilton was right, "the main thing you need to know about the cloud is it's greedy."
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