The largest cloud service providers in the world, Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, have been competing for a long time and one of the edges of this dispute is to offer companies an environmentally friendly strategy.
The intention is that caring for the environment is one of the selling points for its cloud hosting services, one of the great businesses of this decade.
In this context, we must analyze the announcement of this Tuesday, October 12, by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which said that its Google Cloud service will inform its customers from now on the carbon emissions required by its presence in the cloud.
In this way, companies will be able to incorporate this variable into their emissions calculations and more closely design their environmental marketing strategies and corporate social responsibility projects.
In addition, Google will release millions of new satellite images for companies to conduct environmental analysis.
The new features are among the announcements Google Cloud made as it kicked off its annual customer conference on October 12.
Google’s new carbon footprint reporting tool, similar to the one Microsoft already offers, shows the emissions associated with electricity used to store and process a customer’s data, it says Reuters.
Additionally, Google will warn customers when they are wasting energy on idle cloud services.
The Google Earth Engine maps that will be released for companies, strictly speaking, have already been used by researchers, governments and advocacy groups for a long time.
They include numerous geospatial data such as Landsat and the necessary software to analyze it.
The advantage for companies with the release of these images is that they could use them to ensure that supply chains are sustainable and, at the same time, to project new logistics routes that do not affect the environment, or do so as little as possible.
According to Google, Unilever has already been testing this technology in the last year for its palm oil supply in Indonesia.
In a global survey this year, 67 percent of respondents said they are using Microsoft Azure for their cloud services. Amazon Web Services, which was the first until 2020, moved to the second place.
Additionally, the percentage of respondents not using any type of cloud dropped to 4 percent in 2021 from 8 percent in 2020.