Sufficient Use of the Cloud for Work: Practitioners' Perception and Potential for Energy Saving

Flexible mode of work increases our dependency on cloud services. Although the cloud offers flexibility and collaboration opportunities, it also consumes energy and resources, through the data centers needed for its operation. Suboptimal usage of cloud resources can be minimized through simple tactics towards rational cloud usage in a.o. our daily professional life. This paper presents a study analyzing the impacts of applying such tactics while using the cloud during flexible work. The methodology involves a questionnaire survey conducted among practitioners followed by an experiment to measure energy savings from applying one of the tactics. Survey results uncover the participants' perceptions about applying the tactics in practice. Based on the survey outcomes, we experimented with one of the most preferred tactics, namely 'Closing a tab when it is not needed anymore'. Our experiment did not reveal significant energy savings for this tactic on client-side energy consumption, but data traffic was reduced 15.5 times. Through this study, we uncovered major gaps in the literature to quantify and compare digital sufficient behaviors.