Zürich, Tuesday 29 June 2010 – CloudSigma AG has now fully implemented carbon offsetting in relation to its global operations. All customers of CloudSigma now benefit from efficient, low impact cloud computing backed up by carbon offsetting. CloudSigma's carbon neutral cloud services are the first of their kind in the industry. The comprehensive evaluation was conducted by myclimate, the non-profit foundation based in Switzerland specialising in carbon offsetting services.
Patrick Baillie, CEO commented 'Cloud computing in general has the opportunity to improve the general efficiency of server operations. We've complimented this by adopting a strategy of avoid, reduce and offset. By choosing an efficient data centre, using modern power efficient equipment and drawing electricity from one of greenest grids in the world, we've gone a long way to reducing our impact. Offsetting the remaining carbon footprint forms an integral part of our committment to greener computing.'
Customers of CloudSigma will automatically benefit from this offsetting scheme which has been undertaken at a company wide level. The company is fully absorbing the cost of its environmental policy, maintaining the competitive price levels that users already benefit from.
Avoid, Reduce and Offset
Completion of the carbon offsetting forms the third and final part of a ground-up strategy to build a computing platform with a low environmental impact. To do this meaningfully means building our policy into decision-making processes from the very beginning. Our choice of data centre and location in Switzerland was in no small part guided by our commitment to greener computing. Our data centre which is operated by Interxion boasts one of the highest power efficiencies in Europe for a multi-tenanct facility. Additionally Switzerland has one of the greenest electricity grids in the world. Electricity consumption is by far the biggest source of environmental impact for the company. By drawing electricity from largely low-impact generation sources we have avoided a significant amount of carbon dioxiode emissions from day one.
Using power-efficient servers we are able to achieve more computing throughput for every unit of electricity we consume compared with many other operators. The combination of avoidance and reduction has meant that the amount of carbon dioxide actually needing offsetting is much smaller than traditional hosting providers on a like for like basis.
We chose myclimate because of their non-profit foundation status and because of their commitment to projects that have a meaningful impact on sustainable development and job creation as well as pure carbon dioxide emission reduction.
Patrick continued 'The company co-founders including myself have a strong commitment and understanding of the importance of environmental responsibility. The idea of creating greener computing is very much ingrained in our company culture and forms a very real part of our decision making processes day to day.'
Efficient computing = Economic Benefit
The price of carbon dioxide is expected to rise over the short to medium term with authorities such as the EU and the United States expected to either introduce or extend cap and trade emissions schemes. Pricing of carbon dioxide is driving increased interest in improved computing resource efficiency for both environmental and political reasons. CloudSigma has made the choice to lead the market in embracing new ways of operating that can make a significant contribution to the changes that are needed.
Patrick concluded 'Servers drive the internet and much of the economic growth and technical innovation we see today. De-coupling economic growth from increasing greenhouse gas emissions means companies such as ourselves taking action to improve the way we work. We are taking the lead amongst cloud computing providers in voluntarily adopting efficiency policies and fully offsetting any remaining environmental impact.'
