Join the Movement
Reduce Your Corporate Cloud Waste
Cloud Waste is an ever-growing issue that affects our wallets, and our planet.
Show your company’s commitment to improving both the environment and business efficiency by signing the cloud waste pledge. In doing so, your company will be recognized in the first-ever top 100 list of companies eliminating cloud waste.
What is Cloud Waste & Why Do We Care?
Cloud waste refers to the wasteful spending that occurs under most (if not all) cloud service arrangements. Generally, this waste stems from over-provisioned infrastructure that ends up being unused or under-used, heightening operating costs without adding value.
However, cloud waste is not only an economic problem, but also an environmental problem. The cloud industry is one of climate change’s biggest challenges and most overlooked contributors.
StormForge hopes to combat the impact of cloud waste by optimizing application resources. Help us raise awareness of this issue by signing the Cloud Waste Pledge.
What is the Cloud Waste Pledge?
This pledge is meant to show corporate commitment to improving both the environmental and business efficiency.
In 2020, companies wasted over $17 billion in cloud spend on idle resources. That budget that could have been spent on additional hires or tools.
Data centers emit nearly 100 million metric tons of CO2 annually. We’re hurting our environment by unnecessarily over-provisioning tech resources.
This cloud waste can be reduced. Join us in doing our part.
What Does Signing the Pledge Mean?
Corporations that sign the Cloud Waste Pledge:
- Commit to making cloud waste reduction a company goal
- Believe that cloud waste can be addressed through optimization
- Have an internal initiative dedicated to cloud waste, or plan to in the next six months.
By signing the pledge, your company will be recognized in the first-ever top 100 list of companies eliminating cloud waste.
Cloud Waste FAQ
Cloud waste refers to purchases of cloud resources that go unused or under-utilized. The resulting, wasteful spending increases operating costs without adding value and precludes using those same funds in other areas of the business while increasing the carbon footprint generated via the idle resources.
As for the wasteful spending and resources that the term ‘cloud waste’ refers to, clouds themselves do not produce this waste. Rather, the digital waste is created when people buy more cloud resources than they actually need, and then either don’t use them or under-use them.
Clouds do, however, create another type of waste. That’s the byproducts of all the energy consumed (including electrical, ventilation, heating, cooling, etc.) in the process of running the data centers required to provision cloud services. In particular, it’s the large amounts of CO2 that data centers release into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.
From the financial perspective, any operational expense that is unnecessary, or that is in excess of what’s needed is a luxury that companies cannot afford in today’s highly competitive market. Those funds should either be redirected in ways that create more business value, or be saved to improve bottom-line results.
From the environmental perspective, wasteful uses of energy contribute unnecessarily to the pollution that we all need to reduce in order to reverse the devastating course of climate change.
The real answer to this question is complex, involving why people essentially pad their projects with extra resources in order to ensure success rather than taking the risk of ‘right sizing’. Reducing cloud waste involves making many changes, but perhaps the biggest is creating a new mindset around cloud resource setting. Going for cloud efficiency instead of doubling or tripling what’s necessary needs to be the new mantra.
Although it remains a little-known fact, data centers are major emitters of CO2 into the atmosphere. Those emissions contribute to climate change. And datacenter inefficiencies (running more resources than needed, and running resources that go unused, etc.) needlessly make matters worse.
There are several actions that organizations can take in order to identify and reduce their cloud waste. These steps include making accurate cloud resource needs assessments, and comparing them to items such as actual cloud resource usage and contracted service availability. Encouraging and promotion right-sized cloud resourcing, and discouraging padding is a major help.