New study by 451 Research finds migrating IT workloads to the cloud could reduce carbon emissions for Singaporean companies by 76%
SINGAPORE – August 11, 2021 – Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced findings of the Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to the Cloud for APAC report by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. The report found that typical Singaporean enterprises and public sector organizations that migrate compute workloads from on-premises data centers to cloud infrastructure could expect to reduce their energy use – and associated carbon footprint – by up to 76%.
Commissioned by AWS, 451 Research surveyed more than 500 private and public sector organizations across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, spanning a variety of industries across Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. This includes over 100 survey respondents in Singapore. The report also found that cloud service providers who tap into the local renewable energy market to run their operations in Singapore on 100% renewable energy could further boost carbon emissions savings. According to the report, if just 25% of the 1,300 Singaporean firms employing more than 250 employees[1] put one megawatt (MW) of computing workload into the cloud[2], powered by renewable energy, it would save the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from 23,500 Singaporean households[3].
“Customers in APAC who move compute workloads to the AWS Cloud can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, benefiting from the net effect of all our sustainability efforts,” said Ken Haig, Head of Energy Policy, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS. “Our scale and focus on innovation allow us to improve efficiency of our data center operations faster than traditional enterprises. Apart from maximizing efficiency of our operations to reduce the amount of energy needed to power our data centers, we’re also working towards procuring 100% renewable energy for our worldwide energy needs by 2030 and are on a path to reach that milestone globally by 2025. APAC energy markets remain among the most challenging in the world for businesses seeking to source 100% renewable energy, but we continue to collaborate with private and public organizations to overcome these barriers and invest in more projects in the region. At AWS, we are also working closely with customers to help them meet their own sustainability goals using cloud technology and driving innovation in low carbon solutions. We applaud the Singapore Government’s cloud-first policies and its commitment to building a robust digital economy through continued innovation. We believe the cloud can play a critical role in helping Singapore achieve its net-zero carbon goals including initiatives like the Singapore Green Plan 2030.”
In March 2021, Amazon signed the company’s first renewable energy project in Singapore. When the 62 MW solar project is completed in 2022, it will be among the largest aggregated moveable solar energy systems designed and installed in Singapore, expected to generate 80,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of clean energy annually, enough to power more than 10,000 Singaporean homes. Amazon is currently the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy with 232 wind and solar projects globally.
“In our survey, only Singaporean organisations outperformed the APAC average for both data center server-level and facility-level efficiency,” said Kelly Morgan, Research Director, Datacenter Infrastructure & Services at 451 Research of S&P Global Market Intelligence. “This is due to the fact that enterprises and public sector organisations in Singapore consolidate workloads more to reduce the number of servers needed, which drives up utilisation and efficiency. Singaporean organisations have also been relatively early adopters of the latest server technology and refresh their servers faster on average. While still low in terms of overall renewable energy penetration, the grid in Singapore is currently the least carbon-intensive in surveyed APAC countries. Yet Singaporean organizations moving to the cloud could still see an average workload energy reduction of 76%. This is because cloud providers like AWS are driven to make all parts of their infrastructure work in sync to increase efficiency, from design to operations, to lower costs and provide IT services at scale.”
Beyond providing cost savings and process efficiency, AWS is committed to empowering Singaporean customers with the tools to innovate towards their own sustainability solutions on the cloud. For example, Maxeon Solar Technologies, a global leader in solar innovation headquartered in Singapore, have decided to go all-in with AWS Cloud in Singapore to make their operations more efficient, focusing on customers in over 100 countries and contributing to their own sustainability goals. Maxeon Solar Technologies worked with AWS on an accelerated plan to migrate their enterprise workloads from a physical data center to the AWS Cloud in three months.
“At Maxeon, our solar products are Powering Positive Change in more than 100 countries worldwide,” said Lindsey Wiedmann, Chief Legal Officer and Global ESG Executive Leader at Maxeon Solar Technologies. “The solar industry is a critical part of the fight against climate change and at Maxeon, we continue to push the boundaries of innovation in order to deliver more industry-leading solar technologies around the world and create a better future for our planet. Now, with the support of AWS and the power of cloud computing, we are better able to achieve our business goals in a sustainable way, leveraging AWS’s operational efficiency, reliability and security to drive faster innovation in solar.”
AWS is committed to running its business in an environmentally friendly way, and its scale and infrastructure makes it possible to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center. AWS server systems are designed for power optimization and use the latest component technology. For example, custom-built AWS Graviton2 processors – offered to AWS customers – provide better performance per watt than any other Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) processor. AWS is also innovating the design of cooling systems to reduce water use and utilizes real-time sensor data to adapt to changing weather conditions. Cooling is especially important across APAC, where more hot and humid climates result in greater energy expended on cooling.
451 Research found the energy efficiency gains of cloud data centers came from their use of the latest, most energy-efficient servers, which typically run at higher utilization rates than on-premises data centers. These two factors combined led cloud data centers to use 67.4% less energy. The average server utilization in APAC enterprises was just under 15%. By contrast, 451 Research shows that cloud operators utilize servers well above 50% to find the right balance between efficiency and application performance. The research also found that facility-level energy efficiency gains at cloud data centers, including the use of advanced power distribution systems and cooling technology, provided an additional 11.4% of energy savings. Cloud data centers perform the same workloads with five times more energy efficiency than APAC enterprises and public sector organizations.
Amazon is committed to building a sustainable business for customers and the planet, and invites organizations to join The Climate Pledge, a commitment to becoming net-zero carbon by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Now more than 100 organizations have signed The Climate Pledge, committing to use their scale to decarbonize the economy through real business change and innovation.
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