It's time to assess your data backup carbon footprint

Why should a business care about its carbon footprint?

Considering the potential for upfront costs, organizations might have a hard time justifying investments in addressing environmental concerns. Many of the factors associated with reducing a carbon footprint are part of a long-term view of benefits and risk mitigation rather than short-term gains.

Three major long-term justifications for focusing on reducing an organization's environmental impact include cost, compliance and reputation.

Businesses might reduce costs by reducing on-premises power, cooling and hardware consumption. Energy efficiency often goes hand in hand with business efficiency. For example, maximizing storage space utilization means buying fewer drives, affecting both costs and emissions.

When it comes to compliance, legal and regulatory measures might require an organization to know and disclose information related to the company's carbon footprint. Local, regional and national governments continue to require businesses to measure and report carbon emissions.

Individuals and organizations also are more discerning about environmental concerns than in the past, so ensuring a company adheres to such practices could bring additional business. Younger workers also recognize the importance of sustainability and reducing environmental impact, so emphasis on these types of programs could be a way to retain employees and draw in younger generations.

Calculating data backup carbon emissions

One way to calculate energy consumption and carbon emissions is by job size and related energy costs. Calculate the backup infrastructure's energy consumption in kilowatt-hours.

Backup components include many devices, from storage servers to network infrastructure to cooling. Hardware vendors can provide estimated consumption values, or you can use energy monitoring tools.

Next, work with the power provider to determine energy sources. These could include coal, renewables or others. Multiply the energy consumed by the emissions estimates for each energy source. The result is emissions in CO2 from the backup infrastructure. Measures also refer to combined greenhouse gases as CO2 equivalents, or CO2e.

Reduce a data backup carbon footprint

One way organizations might reduce the environmental impact of data backups is by shifting backups to the cloud. Cloud service providers and large data center vendors are often better positioned for efficient resource use and consolidating resources for multiple customers.

Moving backups and other data storage to cloud data centers helps reduce an organization's immediate consumption and integrates with a larger, more efficient body of consumers. It's a balance of a relatively small number of data centers with a significant impact against a vastly larger number of less efficient on-premises tools.

Cloud service providers invest heavily in efficient systems that take maximum advantage of economies of scale. They can justify large, dense projects that are out of reach for most smaller organizations. This applies to backup storage and the supporting cooling, power and network infrastructure.

Cloud and data center vendors also tend to be aware of the latest renewable energy sources to get the most out of them and retain greater control over supply. Smaller companies cannot usually invest themselves as deeply.

Organizations should carefully examine on-premises power consumption and compare it with cloud-based options. It's likely that a company spends far more on powering and cooling a small server room than a cloud service provider spends hosting that same data. They should also consider hardware lifecycles for on-premises servers and backup drives. Document how frequently the organization rotates out hardware and disposes of it.

Businesses can also reduce their impact by configuring efficient backup jobs that cover only the data they need. Reducing the size of backup jobs is a solid idea given how unlikely it is that an organization will need any significant amount of backed-up data. As long as the organization maintains copies for disaster recovery, extraneous backups should be deleted.

There are several ways of managing efficient backups, including the following:

• Configure backup jobs for only the content that needs to be backed up.
• Avoid duplicating data in backups by ensuring duplicate files aren't stored in multiple places.
• Confirm that backup jobs meet recovery point objectives without exceeding them to avoid running backups more frequently than necessary.
• Research available compression algorithms and use the most efficient option.
• Compress data effectively to reduce backup job size.
• Utilize data deduplication methods to reduce the size of backup jobs further.

Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to TechTarget Editorial and CompTIA Blogs.