An organization needs to rapidly scale its use of computing resources and honor its commitment to environmental sustainability. What should the organization do?

Refactoring application software reduces energy per unit of work but does not itself provide rapid scaling of computing capacity as demand changes.

Public cloud providers like Google operate at massive scale with highly optimized, energy-efficient data centers that achieve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratios far below industry average, and Google Cloud has been carbon-neutral since 2007 with goals for 24/7 carbon-free energy. Cloud infrastructure also enables instant elasticity, allowing organizations to scale compute resources up or down in minutes without purchasing hardware. This simultaneously addresses both the scalability and sustainability requirements.

Switching to a carbon-neutral energy provider for an on-premises data center addresses sustainability but does not provide the rapid, elastic scaling that cloud infrastructure offers.

Purchasing energy-efficient servers improves sustainability modestly but requires long procurement cycles and does not enable rapid scaling of computing resources.