By Dr. Tim Wagner, Co-founder and CEO,
Vendia
The signs of climate change are hard to
miss these days and business leaders are under increasing pressure to address
sustainability within their own organizations. And while Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of CIOs
will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of their IT organization,
meaningful progress isn't happening fast enough.
Blockchains have been touted as one way
for businesses to combat the climate crisis, both by tracking carbon emissions
and carbon trades and also as a key IT technology that can solve problems of
data sharing within and across businesses. But what if blockchains actually
made the environment worse?
First generation blockchains were
actually incredibly inefficient in their carbon footprints. Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency,
still employs a proof-of-work algorithm that consumes vast amounts of processing power,
using around 136 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year - more than the entire
regions of the Netherlands and Argentina. And despite migrating to a
Proof-of-Stake approach, Ethereum remains many orders of magnitude
more costly in terms of power consumption on a per-transaction basis than
conventional databases, worsening the prospects for a company looking to
improve their carbon emissions profile. Little known to the general public,
behind the scenes Ethereum servers have been growing larger every year,
increasing the cost per transaction as their "silicon footprint" expands in
direct correlation with that network's carbon footprint. To make matters worse,
Ethereum and most other first generation chains offered no solution for files,
requiring yet more services and an even larger infrastructure footprint to
handle.
More modern approaches, rely on vastly more efficient serverless
technologies and sustainable public cloud services. By
exploiting these cloud-native technologies, modern blockchains offer tight cost
enveloping and a carbon footprint that is actually lower than conventional ("centralized") IT approaches to sharing
data through hosted databases and APIs. Features designed to minimize file
redundancy further enhance the ability of IT teams to improve storage
efficiency without compromising functionality or security, and enable companies
to target carbon reduction without increasing staffing or infrastructure spend.
Enterprises and companies of all sizes
can benefit from both the speed of delivery and the improved cost and carbon
footprint outcomes derived from SaaS-delivered blockchain capability using
these newer approaches, allowing them to build cost-effective cross-cloud data
fabrics and partner data sharing and operational data service solutions while
simultaneously improving their carbon
footprint stance.
Additionally, by leveraging the
SaaS-style delivery of modern blockchains, companies can also dramatically
reduce the levels of staffing required to both develop and then operate the
resulting systems, effectively shifting much of that burden onto the public
cloud and blockchain service providers themselves, lowering IT costs even
further. Companies can also benefit from the massively multi-tenanted nature of
the underlying cloud infrastructure, combined with the security and safety of
having professionally managed fleets and software systems that are fully
outsourced and staffed 24x7x365 around the globe.
Because blockchain technology ranges from
the environmentally destructive to environmentally friendly multi-tenancy, IT
professionals facing technology choices need to be careful to ensure they are
adopting technologies that will be both cost-effective and present their companies in the best possible light when carbon
footprint reporting goes fully into effect. The following list will help
identify technologies that improve a company's carbon footprint stance, rather
than damaging it:
Consider
on-chain file management
Does the solution support on-chain file
management with high availability and redundancy, low latency, and IT-ready
redundancy controls? Files are a large portion of an IT organization's storage
footprint; without a solution for managing and tracking content duplication and
exchange, redundant file storage will quickly dominate attempts to share data
effectively. Availability and redundancy should be built-in features, not
client- or application-derived outcomes.
Serverless
vs. servers
Is the solution serverless or "single server"
in nature? Serverless solutions offer 100% application utilization by
construction, in addition to offering built-in scaling and fault tolerance.
Decentralized networks comprising single machines are not fault tolerant,
cannot scale, and are "always on" solutions (aka "scale to peak capacity") that
negatively impact a company's carbon footprint.
Strive
for SaaS
Is the solution delivered as a SaaS offering?
SaaS offerings not only dramatically reduce development and maintenance costs,
they also enable multi-tenanted approaches that increase efficiency and lower
aggregate costs and carbon footprint further.
In a few short years, saving the
environment has gone from a fringe environmental awareness movement to one of
the top concerns of nations, influencing domestic and international policy
alike. With new reporting requirements already present and the high likelihood
of increased corporate compliance and reporting requirements, now is the time
for CIOs, CEOs, and others to evaluate their IT choices and put strategies in
place to lower carbon emissions over the long haul.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Tim Wagner, CEO and Co-founder, Vendia
Tim is the inventor of AWS Lambda and a former general manager of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway services. He has also served as vice president of engineering at Coinbase, where he managed design, security and product management teams. Tim co-founded Vendia to help organizations of all sizes share data more effectively across clouds and companies.