Carbon Footprint of IT-Services – A comparative Study of Energy Consumption for Offline and Online Storage Usage

This paper focusses on the Carbon Footprint of IT-Services (CFIS) by presenting a comparative study of energy consumption for Offline and Online Storage. We therefore conducted a case study with an IT-Service provider as well as experimental simulation of customer’s ICT hardware. Based on literature review, we initially present related work and describe underlying concepts e.g. Carbon Footprint of Products, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as well as ICT energy and performance measurement. The paper proposes a methodological framework for CFIS based on the phases of LCA. Geared towards the framework we present a comparison of ICT-related energy consumptions for Offline and Online Storage as well as allocation and calculation approaches. Finally, presented carbon footprint results are discussed in terms of limitations and further research directions. The CFIS is an inevitable step to advance Green IS/IT research, since it quantifies dependencies between IT-Services, ICT energy consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions