A  case study published in The International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management demonstrates that the adoption of integrated cloud-computing solutions can lead to significant cost savings for businesses, as well as large reductions in the size of an organization’s carbon footprint.

The research, which was carried out by Dietmar Nedbal and Mark Stieninger of The University of Applied Science Upper Austria, focuses on the case of an Austrian SME specializing in the production of safety boots. The company switched from a paper- to an e-invoicing system offered through a cloud-computing solution provider on a ‘software  as a service’ (SaaS) basis. Nedbal and Stieninger have calculated that a complete switch to e-invoicing has the potential to reduce costs by up to 62 percent and slash the related carbon footprint by over half.

Nedbal and Stieninger’s research paper is available online, here.

Andrew Purcell is the editor of iSGTW and is based at CERN, near Geneva. This article originally appeared in iSGTW on July 16, 2014. Read the full article: Study suggests cloud computing can make business more green