Saturday, October 1, 2011

Cloud Computing

Nate insists that his eco-friendly activities get shared as well, so this week's post is about cloud computing. I guess it's something we both do, but he takes advantage of it much more as a tech junkie.

Cloud computing is essentially storing your data in a centralized location out of your computer. The hardware is not at your site. Because you don't have to pay for very expensive, top-of-the-line hardware yourself, you save money. In addition, because the information is stored off site, you can access your data from anywhere.

More importantly, but consolidating the energy that all of us use during computing to one central location, we reduce the energy used. "A recent report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons (Google Blog-Gmail: It's Cooler in the Cloud)."

Nearly everyone is already cloud computing without thinking of it-email, Google docs, Facebook, etc. We can make conscious choices to do even more. Dropbox is one free option. This program allows you to easily upload data from your computer and access it from anywhere.

Look for other ways to increase your cloud computing and decrease your carbon emissions even more. 

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