CenterBeam, Inc.

Many businesses are seeking out green IT initiatives as a way to cut their emissions and save money on energy. For a number of companies, implementing a cloud computing solution has enabled them to achieve these two goals. According to CSC's Cloud Usage Index, 64 percent of organizations cut their energy and reduced waste from their move to cloud computing.

There are positives in everything, and evidence of that is the University of Virginia's paper, The Data Furnace: Heating Up With Cloud Computing, which argues that data servers in homes or offices could offer lower emissions by working as a heater as well as a server

Businesses striving for green IT should look to cloud computing to reduce their emissions and save money, according to a post by Mandira Srivastava on Small Biz Technology's website. She said with energy to data centers increasing, using the cloud could be a great way for companies to limit their carbon footprint.

In an effort to make use of The Green Grid's metrics and standards to build a cloud computing usage model, the Open Data Center Alliance and TGG have joined forces.

While the environment is heavily impacted by online use with things such as data centers leaving a big carbon footprint, EarthTalk said cloud computing could help move green IT forward by centralizing things a big more. Individual purchases aside, EarthTalk said the cloud is very important for the future.

The Green Unbreakable Cloud Initiative is looking to make an impact on green IT with cloud computing, and CloudPro's Jennifer Scott said it appears to be working thus far.

While cloud computing energy consumption is a source of debate, according to a post by Joe McKendrick, moving business to the shared pool of the cloud could be an energy saver.

According to new research from the Carbon Disclosure Project, cloud computing could be a good move toward green IT, as it would cut CO2 emissions by millions.

As many companies strive to bring green IT solutions, a new study by Pike Research shows that cloud computing could cut data center energy consumption by as much as one-third by 2020.

Earlier this month, Google revealed how it uses cloud computing as a part of its inner workings for green IT. The company launched The Big Picture, a website that allows users to access its figures for energy use and its carbon footprint, which CloudPro said were previously kept close to the company.