How leaders can optimize the cloud for greater returns and sustainability

Cloud’s impact on the health and wellness industry

The return on such investments can be enormous, as realized recently at a large health care company. Like many others, this company had a data center on premises at each of its many locations around the country, each running tremendous numbers of applications, some in the cloud and some purely local. Migrating everything to one central, outsourced data center took the 10-person EY team just 180 days and saved the company millions of dollars, while at the same time rationalizing its data management and application architecture.

The CEO imperative for cloud

For many CEOs, cost-cutting provides the major incentive for cloud migration and consolidation. However, another factor driving the trend is business leaders’ push to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions.  

EY professionals estimate that computers, data centers and networks consume about 10% of the world’s electricity, demanding about 190 terawatt-hours (190 trillion watts) of energy per year — more electricity than the entire state of New York uses over the same period. Other studies put this total even higher: between 196 and 400 terawatt-hours for the data center industry alone. 

Of course, a company that migrates all of its on-premises data storage and usage to the cloud merely shifts its energy expenditures off its own books and on to its cloud partner’s. Still, that’s a powerful incentive. The motivations behind moving to this consolidated model are different for every company, but much of the impetus with clients has been around a sustainability initiative. It may be pushed from the top down, but it could also be from the bottom up — from employees who are saying, ‘We want to work for a more sustainable company.

The CIO imperative for cloud

With so much of the intense work of cloud migration behind them, corporate tech leaders now look for help in “normalizing” their cloud capabilities throughout their business processes. CIOs are saying, ‘I’ve purchased all of these different clouds — some software, some hardware — now, what do I do with it? How can I leverage my data better? And how can I work with the purchases of the pandemic years to be able to get more fruitful data?’ 

Companies are increasingly deploying their data to analyze trends in ways that boost revenue growth and reduce costs. At the EY organization, we want to help clients identify the correct use case for their business requirements, and then help them use their data efficiently and effectively to get a better output of decisions. We leverage client data to get them the best output. And we work with them to fully understand what the burden is on their environment.

Cloud’s impact on the energy industry

In the manufacturing and oil and gas sectors, where there is a particularly large commitment to this effort, consolidated cloud capabilities now make it possible for companies to pass real-time trend information to their customers in ways designed to affect their consumption patterns. For instance, residential utility customers may be notified when they’re drawing on renewable energy sources and when they should reduce their electricity usage.