Andrew Hatton is head of IT at Greenpeace UK
With Greenpeace’s “Clean our Cloud” initiative now well into its second year, Business Cloud News had the chance to speak with Andrew Hatton, the UK branch’s head of IT about the progress the initiative has made with the campaign as well as the organisation’s own shift into the cloud.
The not-for-profit launched the initiative in the spring of 2012 shortly after the organisation produced the “How Clean is Your Cloud?” report, which published the carbon footprint of prominent companies offering cloud services and graded these companies on the basis of their clean energy usage, energy efficiency and energy sourcing transparency.
The name-and-shame approach resulted in some kickback from leading cloud companies, prompting some to release statements publicly reaffirming their commitments to clean energy while others like Facebook and Google opted to sit down with organisation to see what could be done to shift their operations and datacentres towards the use of greener technologies.
“I don’t think they expected it and they were quite resistant towards it in fact, but I think they’ve really come around and have taken big steps in the right direction over the past year or so,” Hatton says.
While the recession has caused many companies to shelve green energy plans and focus more on energy efficiency, the past 12 months have shown that cloud providers have begun to change their tune, with some making substantial investments into getting their datacentres running renewables. Apple now claims to have all of the company’s datacentres running on 100 per cent renewable energy. Facebook and Salesforce have also made substantial investments into greening their own data centres, with Google taking some fairly significant strides in the space. The company has invested over $1bn in clean energy and announced earlier this year that it will be partnering with Duke Energy Corp in North Carolina, US to purchase renewable energy tarrifs from the utility directly, selling back any excess to the grid. And in the UK, many datacentre operators now claim to be reducing their and their customers’ energy footprints or making use of wind energy in some way.
But is the value proposition simply one of seeming ethically sound, or is there a business case built from the bottom line up?
“The reason they’re doing this is partly because of campaigning and seeing that customers – particularly consumers and also business customers – want this. But from discussions I also think they probably see that, particularly for companies as large as Google, energy costs are only going up, and coal is only going to get increasingly expensive. So renewable energy makes business sense in the long run,” Hatton says.
As one might suspect, Greenpeace’s prioritising clean energy has impacted how the organisation perceives and moves to the cloud itself. “I think it’s fair to say that like most organisations, we’re not unusual in that we see increasing amounts of our IT being delivered through cloud solutions, whether that’s public or private or hybrid, but obviously the green conversation tends to happen up front fairly early on, whereas for many organisations it may not even factor into the discussion at all,” Hatton says.
The company has invested in making its sites very green and efficient, which for Greenpeace UK, from a green perspective, means the company doesn’t mind keeping servers on premises for the time being. The company is still moving some of its IT to the cloud and is about halfway through moving their office systems over to Google Apps, but Hatton did express caution on the basis of experience. “One thing you will find is that you might move to one cloud provider like Microsoft or Google, but for email there’s other requirements that you need to take into account like data retention or backup that aren’t met by that provider solution, so you then do a bolt-on with another solution. You could end up paying double,” Hatton says.
Part of the challenge may be due to the fact that Google went to market primarily as a consumer offering before the company began bundling and adding other enterprise-focused services under the Google Apps umbrella. To some extent, the issue of security for some providers has come about through this shift from consumer-to-enterprise.
“They’re using SSL and that was fine, but that’s not enough nowadays, and many organisations are now moving to other factors of security like true form where you have a device and a code and a signing with a password. Google and Microsoft haven’t implemented an encryption technology where the companies can own the keys and it’s integrated into the cloud solution. At the moment if you do this you break the collaboration and sharing – which is obviously one of the main drivers of those organisations moving to those platforms,” Hatton says, suggesting that solutions providers like Google need to work harder to make some of these encryption technologies more seamless, and offer more thorough auditing for PCI compliance and the like. For Greenpeace, a company that handles large volumes of sensitive data on donors, adhering to European data protection legislation is essential. But Hatton suggests that large cloud providers need to become more “European friendly”. “At the moment, there are big compromises that have to be made – the technology exists, and I think we’ll get there, but we’re not there yet,” he says.
Above all, Hatton stresses that from a quality of service perspective the benefits of the cloud far outweigh the drawbacks, but more work needs to be done to ensure these providers use green energy to offer cloud services. As onshore wind is likely to hit grid parity within the next year or two and hydroelectric continues to drop in cost, Hatton’s observations on the long-term business case for going clean may resonate with these companies.
But some providers with a datacentre footprint as vast as Google’s or Facebook’s still need convincing. “Our challenge at the moment is to get Amazon in line with those other organisations – because they’re a major player, particularly in the enterprise market and they just haven’t faced up to their responsibilities when it comes to the impact of their energy usage. They’re the biggest publicly quoted company that do not reveal their carbon footprint,” Hatton says. There’s also the challenge of getting smaller organisations on board, which Hatton says do not necessarily consider where the energy powering their datacentres comes from. “But I think people are increasingly aware, which is a start,” Hatton says.
