Katie Lantukh is the marketing content writer at GovSense, a trusted true cloud solution for land, license and financials for local governments.
As we look forward to our 2016 initiatives, I would be surprised if some version of “go green” wasn’t on many of those lists. And what better time to start going green – you’ve finished off the Christmas cookies, signed up for a gym membership and started counting belt notches — why not bring the “New Year, New You” philosophy to our jurisdictions.
One of the most proven ways to bring the green to your city or county is moving applications to the cloud. Here are three main ways that using the cloud will greatly decrease your jurisdiction’s carbon footprint.
Reduce electricity consumption in server room
When operating in the cloud, you limit the need for on premise equipment like a server room and hardware because those needs are handled by the cloud solution provider. By moving the server room away from your organization’s physical location, you can reduce software, hardware, maintenance, personnel and occupancy costs. Using an innovative cloud provider enables users to reduce their overall server room electric consumption by more than 99 percent.
Reduce overall cost
By combining energy savings with reduced needs for maintaining software, hardware, maintenance and infrastructure, local government leaders can reduce costs by as much as $100,000 per year. Instead of spending valuable resources maintaining the hardware and infrastructure, those resources can be dedicated to more forward-focused tasks, rather than maintenance tasks, creating better productivity across the organization. Security is another huge potential for savings in the cloud. Local governments usually don’t have the budget that is required for top security talent, meaning that they often have to look to third parties to provide security. Using a cloud provider, however, allows local governments access to the top security talent already working at the cloud provider, ensuring local government access to top tier security talent at an affordable price. With the cloud, local government leaders aren’t lying awake at night worrying about their security all the while staying in their budget. Win-win.
Decrease capital expenditure
Using the cloud eliminates the need for replacing capital expenditures on a regular basis. The cloud also helps avoid spending on the hardware, software and licensing fees because those things are all managed and maintained in the cloud, not in your physical location. Because server rooms and data centers use power to operate equipment and lighting and maintain a constant temperature for the equipment, eliminating the need for these rooms automatically decreases these expenses.
Local governments are going to be looking for new ways to be more innovative, transparent and lean than years before and moving to cloud models will greatly help achieve each of those goals as we move into this new year.