Ecological sustainability
The impact of digitalisation on the climate is enormous. In order to protect the environment, a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability of software development is indispensable, because without human, technical, economic and social sustainability there are no conditions for ecological sustainability.
US researchers estimate that by 2020, the IT and communications sector generated 3.5% of the global climate emissions, and by 2040 their share is estimated to have increased to 14%. The volume of data in constantly growing, which is why more hyper-scalable data centres are required. The world’s biggest data centres consume the same amount of electricity as one whole country. Renewable energy based data centre solutions are increasingly needed as new technologies (data mining for cryptocurrency, machine and deep learning, IoT, robotic process automation) become more common.
Simply switching to the cloud environment, instead of having private servers, is an environmentally friendly act. If the solution in the cloud environment has been made optimally, by optimising server capacity and storage space, it is possible to achieve a much smaller ecological footprint. This can be seen in cloud environments in reduced electricity consumption and processing power requirements.