The greenhouse gas abatement potential of enterprise cloud computing

•An 80% market penetration rate for cloud computing could cause a 95% reduction.•Smaller sized organisations reduce relatively more GHG emissions from adopting cloud computing than larger organisations.•Cloud computing's market penetration rate must be high for significant GHG abatement.

In this paper we present a dynamic, country level methodology and model to determine the energy related Green House Gas (GHG) emissions abatement potential of enterprise cloud computing. The developed model focused upon demonstrating the impact of a move to cloud computing from traditional on-site computing, by creating country specific estimates of energy and GHG reductions. The methodology presented includes variables for market penetration, organisation size, and organisational adoption of on-site and cloud computing. Using the current enterprise cloud service applications of email, customer relationship management (CRM), and groupware against selected global countries, results indicated that 4.5 million tonnes of CO2e could be reduced with an 80% market penetration for cloud computing. The majority of reductions were calculated to be from small and medium size organisations. A sensitivity analysis of the market penetration and current organisational adoption of cloud computing highlights the possible large variability in overall energy and GHG reductions. An analysis of the model and data used within this study illustrates a requirement for industry and academia to work closely in order to reach the large energy reductions possible with enterprise cloud computing.

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