Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency Research Proposal - 1

Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency - Research Proposal Example result, companies have been moving their operations such as emails, word processing and spreadsheets as well as CRM to the cloud in order to server energy [5]. Generally, the concerns regarding the environmental impacts as well as the energy needs of data centers such as the cloud has been growing with the exponential increase in data centers. Consequently, the potential gains in energy efficiency by moving the software of businesses to the cloud are largely attributed to the fact that the data centers and servers currently hosting cloud services are significantly more efficient and green than the IT infrastructure that is currently used by most companies [8]. These energy savings are particularly significant for smaller companies which often tend to possess some of the most inefficient IT services. Despite the general agreement that cloud computing is currently more efficient than many of its alternatives, the implementation of cloud computing has faced a number of power and energy consumption concerns particularly with regard to the power and energy consumed by the modern cloud computing systems and data center equipment as well as the connected cooling systems [5]. The energy is mainly consumed when transporting the required data from the users to the cloud data centers and then back. Data centers currently consume nearly 1.4% of the entire global electrical energy with an average growth rate of 12% annually [11]. Skeptics argue that the greenhouse gas production associated with the power consumption at data centers is will double in the near future if the current popularity of cloud services continues. Moreover, the high consumption of power also often results in the release of heat which may further cause energy inefficiencies due to increased amount of energy required for removing the heat(cooling) as well as the high probability of hardware system failures [1]. Another potential cloud computing energy efficiency problem is the increasing greenhouse gas