One of them is being conscious of your greenhouse gas emissions as cloud systems can be much more energy efficient, says Google.

For example, the company claims that using Gmail instead of your average enterprise email system is up to 80 times better for the environment. The reason? Cloud servers are leveraged 100 percent while average enterprise servers never use their entire capacity and have processing overhead wasted. Google says using Gmail for an entire year uses less energy than is required to manufacture a bottle of wine, drink the wine, “stuff a message in the bottle and throw it in the ocean” (about 1.2 kg CO2).

Similarly, one minute of watching YouTube videos uses 0.00002 kWh of energy on Google’s side, without counting the client PC that actually displays the video. So, if you want to move certain services to the cloud, but run out of arguments to support such a strategy, greening your IT may be an interesting angle.