Pictured: Lakhi Dhatt, director of Intelligence Works

With E.ON the latest of four of the "big six" energy giants to impose double-digit electricity price rises, West Midlands IT consultancy Intelligence Works is advising that businesses can reduce IT infrastructure electricity consumption by as much as 90 per cent by switching to cloud computing.

Intelligence Works, a Microsoft Partner, has released the findings from a study conducted by Accenture and WSP Environment & Energy which demonstrates cloud computing's potential to operate business applications more efficiently.

The study assessed the carbon footprint of server, networking and storage infrastructure for three different deployment sizes (100, 1,000 and 10,000 users), finding that the smaller the organization, the larger the benefit of switching to the cloud. When small organizations (100 users) move to the cloud, the effective carbon footprint reduction could be up to a 90 percent savings by using a shared cloud environment instead of their own local servers.

Lakhi Dhatt, director of Intelligence Works, commented: "Cloud computing is growing in popularity for small businesses because it often means there is no need to invest in the capital expenditure of physical servers - a saving which can amount to many thousands of pounds. Additionally it offers greater resilience against hardware faults, as your data is stored across many servers online compared to the one or two servers a SME might usually have.

"With energy prices on the rise, this study adds a further compelling reason for businesses to seriously consider cloud computing. As a Microsoft Partner, we are able to offer you the peace of mind that we can offer you the industry-standard business applications you're used to with exceptional service and support."

Based in the heart of the Midland's technology community at Birmingham Science Park Aston, Intelligence Works provides bespoke and off-the-shelf IT solutions to a variety of SMEs and public sector and third sector organisations.