A simple strategy for mitigating some of the issues around Energy supply and costs

Stories about the impending energy crisis facing the UK, and our colleagues in continental Europe and the US, are coming at us thick and fast at the moment.

Concerns about the supply and cost of the energy that we consume domestically are the key focus, but the impact on commercial organisations is one that is overlooked currently. Lots of businesses will be impacted by the pricing issues, especially those that don’t have a current fixed price supply agreement as there are no government price caps to help lessen the impact of the supply side issues, driving up cost per kWh.

Many small businesses will be hit the hardest.

For any businesses that are involved in information and data management, there is a fairly simple strategy for mitigating some of this risk; move as many workloads as possible to the cloud. If you are running any form of on-premise datacentre, it was likely your biggest energy consumer prior to the current crisis. Making any reductions here will have a fundamental impact on your exposure to cost or supply challenges.

As a Microsoft Advanced Partner, we are naturally going to focus on the Microsoft Cloud in our recommendations, but the principles apply to all cloud providers.

The key benefits include:

• Cloud compute using utility-based pricing means the energy consumption is included in your overall hosting costs.
• The devices that are in use are, by definition, highly energy efficient, which helps to keep the overall cost of hosted workloads in the cloud competitive. This also means the impact from price rises is lessened for these devices, and by extension, your workloads running on them.
• A large volume of Microsoft Cloud’s energy comes from their own sustainable sources, minimising the impact of national grid level supply issues, and with inbuilt resilience in the event of any supply disruption.

The hope is that these energy costs will return to a more normal level at some point, but if Petrol and Diesel prices are anything to go by, they might not bounce back to the pre-2022 rates anytime soon.

On that topic, the savings you make from moving workloads to the cloud don’t just exist for the direct energy consumption of any on premise servers. Storage and associated cooling you may be running and the higher energy costs will be having an impact of the cost of mining materials, industrial production and manufacturing of hardware, and shipping and delivery costs. All of these will drive up the cost of any pending hardware refresh programmes you may run, all of which you can also mitigate by using the cloud.

There are a wide range of environmental benefits to be realised by moving workloads into the cloud, which we have covered in some of our webinars, and we will further explore in more blogs on this topic. Most organisations have built strategies around moving workloads to the cloud, so our recommendation is to look at your big workloads that are consuming the most resources and prioritise those for transition to the cloud platform of your choice.

If you need any help and support in doing this, the Core team can help. We have extensive experience of building and running workloads in Microsoft Azure, including deployment by code (Terraform) for customers who need to spin up new workloads quickly and programmatically. Email us at hello@core.co.uk for more information or to request a discovery call.