The research carried out by Dan Williams at the TSBE Centre and Microsoft, aimed to scientifically quantify the amount of energy consumed, and the amount of greenhouse gas emitted, from using either the Excel, Word, or Outlook service on either Office 365 or Office 2010. In effect, this created an opportunity to compare traditional and cloud computing whereby the same service is offered to the user.
The research created a new methodology to measure the energy consumption of each service across the two office scenarios. The data centre, internet transfer, and user device energy was measured where relevant to each service. Additionally, a model was built using the methodology and used Microsoft Data Centre confidential data, and measurement data from a new method of measuring a user device’s energy consumption in high detail.
Results of the research highlight that cloud computing has a great potential to be a more energy efficient form of computing than traditional computing in certain use cases. For example, in the case of outlook that uses exchange servers, cloud computing has the advantage of highly efficient servers and multi-tenancy. Also, for Excel and its high data processing ability, again cloud computing can more efficiently process data than traditional. For low computing services, such as Word, cloud computing is not an energy efficient as traditional computing however. Word is a very efficient program, and is simplistic in terms of its processing and memory requirements. The good news is that a middle ground opportunity exists, whereby Office 365 and Office 2010 can be used together so that office 2010 processes data locally and office 365 stores and saves the data.
