How Moving to the Cloud Combats Carbon Output
ReluTech’s IT Diveset program helps customers mitigate risk, budgetarily save on-premise costs and maximize recovered value. While there are many advantages of moving to the cloud, one benefit is the reduction of carbon emissions from on-prem data centers. Cloud data centers can achieve high virtualization ratios while utilizing large amounts of renewable energy. At ReluTech, 95% of all gear is refurbished to feed and fund maintenance projects, preventing purchases of new IT assets. The reusing of gear combats waste and alleviates carbon output. The accelerated migration to the cloud ReluTech provides helps customers achieve 80-90% carbon reduction. These components are all a part of ReluTech’s re:Leaf™ Support solution, the industry’s first green service level agreement (SLA) designed to reduce environmental impact while delivering exceptional maintenance services.
ReluTech and Evertreen Partnership
One of the main components of ReluTech’s re:Leaf™ is their partnership with Evertreen. Based in Brentford, England, Evertreen is the only platform where businesses can plant trees and track tree growth via satellite. The satellite tracking provides cognizance of growth status, photosynthetic activity, diseases, and the presence of dry and infertile soil, among many other insights. Evertreen ensures each tree is certified and can be physically visited. Over 660,000 trees have been planted from Evertreen, and ReluTech is committed to increasing that number. With each asset entering the ReluTech Asset Management Portal (RAMP), Evertreen plants a tree in central Africa.
Evertreen simplifies this task by offering the ability to select the tree type and designate where it will be planted. An added benefit to Evertreen’s service is Evertreen’s satellite technology, with which comes the ability to monitor these trees to know the health of the crop and seedlings to enhance the experience of Relutech’s commitment to reforestation. Evertreen has a set monitoring protocol summarized into five key steps set by their planting partner, Edenprojects. These five steps include mapping and field verification of the planting site, photo monitoring, drone mapping, forest inventory, and socioeconomic livelihood surveys. With these steps, Evertreen can monitor the success of the tree plantings as well as the communities that surround them.
Additionally, ReluTech engages local farmers to manage tree plantings through Evertreen. Working with local farmers, Evertreen fosters community involvement by creating valuable employment opportunities. In a ‘Thank You’ video from some of the Evertreen farmers, one speaks about how Evertreen has promoted youth employment and empowerment over the adverse effects of climate change. For these reasons, ReluTech is proudly partnered with Evertreen to guide a path of innovation and reverse the damage that has been done.
AWS and ReluTech’s Commitment to Carbon Neutrality
With millions of users, AWS is one of the world’s largest cloud providers, focused on providing sustainable service to its customers while minimizing its carbon footprint. As discussed in the Sustainability section of the AWS webpage, the studies of 451 researchers have provided evidence that “AWS infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy efficient than the average in Europe.” These researchers also found that AWS can reduce a customer’s carbon footprint by 80%. This number could increase to 96% once AWS switches to 100% renewable energy (currently at 95% in numerous regions).
Using predictions and tracking of the performance of data centers, AWS engineers can predict how such a data center will perform before construction, allowing them to improve the infrastructure’s energy efficiency. Predicting the data center’s performance optimizes energy efficiency. ReluTech is a select AWS technology partner. As a partner of AWS, ReluTech’s Elastic Maintenance solution helps customers avoid costly maintenance renewals during a migration to AWS. Their partnership expands past maintenance solutions as both companies fulfill their commitment to offset carbon emissions by encouraging customers to switch to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud through AWS alleviates the emissions from on-prem hardware, power, and cooling.
An Easy Switch
With this in mind, migration to the cloud is an easier decision than ever. ReluTech assures that customers are receiving savings while offsetting carbon emissions through the transition. ReluTech has pledged “to fundamentally change customers migrations by reducing, reusing and recycling for the most cost-efficient and sustainable data center exit strategy.” They achieve this by combating carbon emissions through tree donations with Evertreen, using eco-friendly packaging, prioritizing engineers with electric vehicles while limiting travel in major cities, and reusing IT assets, all while promoting migration to the cloud. If organizations partner with ReluTech and adopt these eco-conscious solutions, it ultimately helps companies become more sustainable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | ASHLEY JEWELL
Ashley is a Partner Manager Intern at ReluTech and a business administration Student at Furman University.