Government aims for cloud-based carbon reductions

The White House recently announced plans to promote sustainability across the federal government. The plans include the reduction and consolidation of data centers across the country.

The Office of Management and Budget and the White House Council on Environmental Quality recently began working together to improve sustainability efforts in tandem with the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative. The FDCCI is an OMB-led initiative to reduce the number of federal data centers.

One way to reduce the number of data centers is to move government data to the cloud. The government recently adopted a “cloud-first” IT strategy that orders government IT departments to seek cloud solutions wherever and whenever they are applicable.

"This curbed growth of data centers will have the beneficial effect of cutting energy use and costs, which helps the federal government meet... sustainability performance goals,” U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and CEQ chair Nancy Sutley wrote in a recently released memo.

Cloud computing is expected to provide a boost to sustainability efforts. One recent study showed that large corporations can cut their carbon footprint by as much as 30 percent by switching to cloud computing.