Just how green is cloud computing?

Over New Year’s weekend, Facebook users uploaded a record 750 million photos. According to the company’s count, over 100 million photos get uploaded to Facebook each day. And as more of our day-to-day computing activities migrate from hard drives to Internet servers, environmental groups are worried that the trend will result in a bigger carbon footprint.

The critics haven’t shown any sign of letting up

Although the critics haven’t shown any sign of letting up, they do bring up an interesting question. During energy efficiency is a worthy goal to strive for, can it on the whole be considered a step towards sustainability even as the research becomes more ubiquitous?

Such efforts won’t utterly ease the concerns of some environmental groups, now they do suggest that as the market for cloud computing grows, alternative energy solutions will likely play a much larger role.

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