You are here: Home » Cloud computing » From traditional ICT to the cloud – Macquarie Hosting

From traditional ICT to the cloud – Macquarie Hosting

Tony Chan | October 21, 2009 | 1 Comment

Summary of presentation by Leonard Chan, senior manager of Future Technologies, Macquarie Hosting at the Green Telecom Session of the CommsDay Melbourne Congress.

The shift towards cloud based software as a service models will be essential in driving efficiencies of the global ICT industry, says Leonard Chan at Macquarie Hosting.

The fact is, Chan highlighted, if unabated, the global ICT industry will produce more CO2 than the airline industry by 2020, citing figures from Forrester and the UN IPCC. According to those figures, the ICT sector and the airline industry both produced about 830 Mt CO2-e (Mega tonne of CO2 equivalent) in 2007, but emissions from ICT use will rise 72% to 1,430 Mt CO2-e by 2020, while the airline industry will only grow by 33% to 1,100 Mt CO2-e during the same period.

Chan pointed out that the global aviation industry, spurred by high-visibility and awareness of its emissions, have acted quickly on changing societal demands, and is now operating 20% more efficiently than 10 years ago and is projected to gain a further 25% improvement in operating efficiency by 2020.

The ICT industry now has to catch up to avoid being a bigger burden on the environment than air travel.
One of the key component of this change will be Australia’s National Broadband Network, which holds the potential of “supercharging competition and increasing productivity” of ICT in the country.

What the NBN will do is provide a high speed platform to enable a new generation of ICT practices, including virtualisation and cloud computing.

“Virtualisation is not a one-off trend, its ability to abstract underlying platforms will change the way we do IT,” he said. “The real shift is not about underlying technology… The shift is thinking about IT “as a service” rather than connecting boxes together.”

Combining virtualisation and cloud computing to deliver software from the cloud and the advent of the high speed networking from the NBN will be key to reducing the environmental impact of the ICT industry, Chan said.