Blue Ridge Technology

Can your business go green by switching to the cloud? While it isn’t a universal solution that makes sense in every single situation, switching to the cloud can deliver all sorts of benefits to many businesses. But what about its effect on your carbon footprint? Does a cloud migration help you go green, or does it just shift the ecological burden around? If you’re concerned about your environmental impact and are looking at your network and IT environment in that light, here’s what you need to know about the cloud. The Cloud and the Environment If you’re running everything in-house, you can probably get a read on how much your servers and so on are costing you. You can measure the electricity, and that’s a pretty good start. Yes, there are other environmental considerations, like how the hardware you’re using was made, but we’ll set those aside for a moment. Sometimes there’s this idea that moving to the cloud makes those impacts go away. The short answer: that’s not how this works. Mo...

Microsoft’s taking a responsible leadership position on AI AI has been all over the news lately, with questions about whether some of the most advanced AIs are approaching sentience. ( They aren’t , according to most experts in the space, contrary to the alarmist view of one ex-Google AI expert. No Skynet anytime soon, phew!) AI is popping up in all sorts of useful ways throughout the business world. The everyday examples are quality-of-life improvements like AI-powered design recommendations in Microsoft PowerPoint and the machine learning-powered text to speech and voice assistants on our smartphones. On the more advanced end, machine learning and AI are solving complex business intelligence and data analytics problems and even assisting human agents in determining eligibility for loans or picking the best candidates for a job. Here’s the thing, though: on all fronts, there are all kinds of ethical issues to worry about, including AIs that end up adopting racist or sexist biases. Th...