Ash Kosmadia has seen firsthand the impact a transition from an on-premises datacentre can have on an organization – both from an environmental and organizational perspective. As the director of Technology Platform Enablement at BCLC he is overseeing its move to a cloud infrastructure, a project which began nine years ago as part of the Province’s CloudBC initiative.
Initially a collaboration of 14 public sector organizations – including BCLC – CloudBC was established to support the B.C. public sector’s efforts to adopt modern cloud-based business and technology services.
In addition to reducing BCLC’s energy consumption at its Kamloops headquarters, Kosmadia explains that moving to the cloud has significantly increased BCLC’s ability to deliver up-to-date services that reduce operational demand for BCLC employees.
“With the cloud we are able to rapidly deploy new platforms with minimum intervention of technical teams,” Kosmadia said. “It also means that we no longer need to worry about managing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure, patching operating systems or doing any of the other daily activities that are required to ensure our systems are healthy, secure and available for use.”
BCLC has now successfully removed 67 percent of its overall infrastructure footprint from its Kamloops headquarters datacentre.
“This equates to a reduction of approximately $8.3 million worth of technology that we do not have to reinvest in, operate or maintain,” Kosmadia said.
The transition to a cloud datacentre has also seen a substantial reduction in BCLC’s energy consumption at its Kamloops headquarters.
“Operating a datacentre in-house – like the one at our Kamloops office – requires a lot of energy,” said Zoe To, Environmental, Social and Governance Specialist at BCLC. “Switching to the cloud might seem like you're simply shifting emissions from one place to another, but cloud infrastructure providers operate large-scale, energy-efficient datacentres that are often powered by renewable energy.”
Using December 2024’s data as an example BCLC’s cloud environment consumed 38 percent less electricity and produced 84 percent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared its previous on-premises datacentre—despite hosting over 1,500 GB more memory. *
“Previously, we also had challenges when it came to keeping on-site servers at optimal temperatures during the summer and winter months,” To said. “Plus, we did not have the ability to capture any heat generated by the servers and reuse it to heat the building in the winter months like cloud facilities do.”
As such, an additional impact of this transition has been the reduction in BCLC’s investment in heating and cooling systems in Kamloops – systems that are placed under increased stress during extreme weather events.
“Lowering our GHG emissions is key for us to meet our commitment of reducing our Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 50 percent by 2026 and 100 percent by 2030, from the 2019 baseline year,” To said. “For example, Scope 1 emissions are from sources BCLC directly controls like heating and cooling.“
Moving forward, To and Kosmadia look forward to a continued collaboration between their teams – both to track and report on the progress of this work, while expanding the cloud infrastructure to include other areas of the business – like iGaming and Casino production – for increased, sustained and long-term impact.
* These results are based solely on the subset of servers monitored through Dynatrace in a specific timeframe. While it is likely that similar efficiencies may apply across other migrations, we want to be transparent that these figures do not represent the full scope of our cloud transition, which is still ongoing.
