Green cloud computing: strategies to reduce the environmental impact of cloud computing

The recent trend in the computing technology has forced many companies to shift to cloud computing. Due to the increase in business, the data generated is also increasing day by day. All the data that is generated are stored in remote servers called data centers. According to the International Data Co-Operation, there are around 8 million data centers around the world. These data centers are consumers of a large amount of electricity. These data centers pollute the air by emitting a large amount of carbon dioxide. They also generate a lot of heat, so there is a requirement for a large number of cooling systems to cool the data centers which in turn consume a large amount of electricity. This has a negative effect on our environment and it also increases the operational costs. These issues have now become a major concern for cloud service providers. The environmental impacts of these data centers have now become a challenge for many cloud service providers. Companies like Apple, Facebook have already started implementing methods to reduce the carbon footprint. The ultimate aim of green cloud computing is to reduce the negative effects of data centers on the environment as well as the operational costs. In this research firstly, the importance and the need of green cloud is discussed. Secondly, the proposed techniques and the proposed green cloud framework are discussed.