Organisations across the UK could reduce their carbon emissions by half if they moved their data storage to the cloud.

According to a new study published by the Carbon Disclosure Project, companies could achieve considerable cost savings and carbon reductions by 2020 by migrating their IT systems to shared data networks.

The study found that many companies will not take too much convincing to make the move. Many of those surveyed are already planning a move to the cloud and plan to increase their adoption of cloud computing from 10% to nearly 70% of their information technology by the start of the next decade.

The Carbon Disclosure Project says that companies who do this could save millions of pounds, with that figure running into billions in the case of larger companies. This is because organisations that use cloud computing buy less hardware and use servers that are located elsewhere, which cuts down on running costs.

Some people argue that the cloud also reduces the amount of time that it takes for a company to start trading.

Paul Stemmler, from Citigroup, told one news website: “Carbon reduction is one driver, but not the primary driver. “The primary driver is time to market. Developers used to take 45 days to get new servers, but in the internal cloud infrastructure that we operate in our own private network, it takes just a couple of minutes.”

Nearly half of all cloud computing providers expect that the small business sector will lead on the take-up of their services within the next year. This is important knowledge for any organisation offering business internet solutions.

According to a survey by OnApp, a cloud platform provider, 27% of respondents expect organisations from the enterprise sector to be their main clients over the same time period, whilst just 18% think that consumers will lead the way in the take-up of cloud computing services.

The study also demonstrated that the strongest uptake of cloud services by businesses is expected from web and application developers. A total of 67% of cloud providers say that this sector of industry will drive the biggest growth in business for them.

Meanwhile, 42% of those questioned expected to see the biggest growth from the IT sector in general, 39% from financial services and 30% from retail customers.

Those small businesses that were questioned said that they would adopt cloud computing services because they would allow them to scale their IT services on demand whilst not having to run their own IT infrastructure.

Ditlev Bredahl, OnApp’ss CEO, said: “Based on cloud adoption rates, our survey shows that cloud computing is most accessible to technical users right now. Adoption is being driven by small and medium sized businesses focused on application and web development. This makes sense, since sandboxed development, web development and testing are very well suited to a cloud environment.”

Web hosting via a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is one of the most popular solutions currently on the market, and for good reason. It’s affordable at all levels of business and, with the right web hosting company, is generally highly reliable. However, by its very nature, VPS means that your website’s resources will be limited as the space of a single web server is split between varying sites.

The alternative to this is Cloud Hosting, which combines multiple web servers to create a single network. The resources of this network are then allocated to and disseminated amongst sites as they are required. The result is generally less down time for your site and quicker loading speeds.

This type of hosting is now very popular amongst bigger corporations running a large number of websites or hosting numerous pages and products, Google, Bing and Amazon are three major examples. However, the reason it is popular with these big organisations is that it suits this type of company.

Cloud hosting is a very expensive option and while it does guarantee less down time and faster loading, the difference between VPS and Cloud is probably not worth the extra outlay, unless you intend to grow your business across numerous web sites which will require extra resource. For the time-being, a Linux-based solution is probably a better option.

If your company grows to encompass ten or more sites, or you find yourself hosting a 1000 page + website then cloud hosting may be a worthwhile investment; however, most SME’s will find that VPS remains the ideal, cost-effective solution for their site.