Over the last decade, the term “going green” has been used with regard to being environmentally friendly. Businesses are digitizing and virtualizing, eliminating the use for paper and thus cutting down less trees. Consumers are recycling and reusing as much as they can to avoid throwing things away. Now, with the advent of the cloud, businesses have another way to go green. The cloud is an example of green technology.

Prior to the cloud, businesses would have to utilize a physical data center or have their own servers where their information was housed. Sharing those physical resources wasn’t easy, so people would have to go and buy their own servers and their own internet connection. People wasted compute power, memory, internet backbone, and literal physical resources from the world. Those servers use a lot of harmful chemicals like mercury, as well as contain valuable items like gold. These physical resources are limited, things that humans are trying to conserve, including copper. They were also a power drain, costing businesses loads of money just to keep them running, forget maintenance costs.

The choices a business had with regard to servers prior to the cloud were slim. You only had a binary choice: Either get a really big, decent, beefy server that you could grow bigger and bigger, or get a little insufficient server that barely works. Not great options. More often than not, companies went bigger for growth because expanding was time consuming and would cost more if you didn’t.

With the advent of the cloud, compute resources have been democratized with the power of massive scale. Choices in use and consumption of compute, memory are now very fine grained. The servers are virtual and hosted by a third party cloud providers. They are rented as needed and right sized, so the cost is less than having a physical server. And if everyone, every business, was utilizing the cloud in every way possible, you would likely see a significantly lower power draw for the global internet. You would see less raw materials waste. You would see a significant increase in the number of ways compute can be optimized. Pools of compute to crunch genomes sharing the same physical hardware as thousands of little websites all independently virtualized and secured. The cloud is like carpooling and mass transit. So everyone uses what they need and wastes less.

Some people and businesses are leery of using the cloud. There are a lot of myths out there about security and how the cloud works, but the truth is it’s quite secure. And if businesses would utilize the cloud on a global level, not only would they be more efficient, but we would go a long way toward preserving some of our planet’s most valuable resources.