As organisations face the reality of increasing their sustainability, there’s a real risk they’ll see moving all workloads to the cloud as a silver bullet.
On the surface, it looks straightforward: by moving away from hosting your own environment, you pass responsibility for emissions to the cloud providers.
However, there are a couple of reasons this needs a bit more thought. Where does the network come into this sustainability assessment? It doesn’t disappear and continues to play a role in sustainability, but it takes visibility through access to good data to fully understand the network’s impact. Then, moving to the cloud also involves making decisions over infrastructure. If you’re leaving equipment behind, what are the sustainability impacts of that waste? And if you’re optimising your infrastructure by embracing the internet of things, edge computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – have you included any sustainability ‘costs’?
Additionally, it’s important to remember not all cloud services are equal. It’s essential to ensure you have full visibility of the carbon impact of hosting workloads and applications in the cloud provider environment. This should include both the percentage of renewable energy powering the data centre, as well as the embodied emissions for the devices where you’re hosting your workloads. If you want to demonstrate meaningful emissions reduction, you’ll need to carefully think about these when selecting a cloud provider.
The move to the cloud is a dual responsibility: the supplier needs to provide low-emission options, but the purchaser also has to control the amount of data that’s going into storage at the cloud-based data centre to minimise emissions, avoiding the rebound effect.
Three critical steps to embracing dual responsibility
As carbon emission monitoring regulations tighten, there are effective steps you can take to move further down the path to sustainability:
1. Measuring the impact of products and services
Monitoring and measuring the energy used by your network for workloads and apps opens the way to optimising your approach to improve sustainability. Our Carbon Network Dashboard integrates and streamlines data from disparate IT devices to give you real-time power usage and carbon emissions information. This delivers recommendations of how and when you run batch jobs, scheduling them when there’s a high amount of energy on the grid, to optimise the sustainability of your performance.
Beyond network energy use, we have worked with SAP to pilot the SAP Sustainability Data Exchange (SDX). This allows our business customers to view the carbon footprint of their purchases and make informed decisions based on their environmental objectives. As emissions from suppliers and customers usually exceed operational emissions, this exchange provides accurate carbon data for sustainability reporting and adheres to interoperability standards set by the Partnership for Carbon Transparency.
Adopting common standards for sustainability reporting via this tool improves data accuracy and reduces costs. It can also provide opportunities to collaborate with other businesses to enhance sustainability progress. In collaborating with SAP SDX, we are offering full transparency and visibility of the environmental impact of our portfolio, giving customers a choice based on their individual need.
2. Making sustainable procurement decisions
For many organisations, moving workloads to cloud-based collocated data centres brings clear cost benefits and significant sustainability gains. Our cloud-based data centre colocation services delivered in partnership with Equinix, for example, are all powered by 100% renewable electricity globally.
However, moving to a cloud environment is likely to involve discarding or replacing equipment. To help you manage the sustainability impacts of this, our Carbon Network Dashboard can identify and prioritise the replacement of carbon intensive devices. And our Digital Carbon Calculator tool combines carbon footprint data from the IT services you buy from us and the IT services you buy from other vendors to give you the accurate, reliable and consistent data you need to baseline the carbon emissions of your IT inventory, in accordance with the ISO 14040:44 standards.
It also makes sustainability sense to consider end-of-life recycling schemes to minimise waste – particularly as the World Economic Forum reports that e-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world, making up 70% of hazardous waste deposited in landfills. Challenge your suppliers to offer recycling schemes: we’re an accredited Cisco Partner and have all the credentials in place to support you with their Takeback and Reuse Programme that allows the return at no cost of hardware that has reached end of life, with a commitment to reuse and recycle 99.9% of what’s returned.
We’re launching our new sustainable infrastructure proposition that combines the Digital Carbon Calculator, network design and configuration and the Takeback scheme into a single service to help our customers reconfigure their networks for low carbon impact.
3. Optimising your operational environment footprint
Options for boosting sustainability in the operating environment are growing all the time. A good starting point is adopting edge computing to reduce the amount of data centre capacity you need. By keeping processing at the edge, you significantly reduce the volume of data that travels across the cloud to the data centre for processing and storage, enabling data centre consolidation, reduced energy consumption and accelerated decarbonisation.
Edge computing, supported by cloud capabilities, enables AI and machine learning tools that identify energy efficiencies. With our partner, QiO Technologies, for example, we offer a dynamic AI model that simultaneously optimises your energy use, carbon emissions, production throughput and quality. It then helps you monitor and service your assets with predictive and prescriptive insights to maintain optimal Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and to extend the life of your assets. It’s the key to reducing your energy costs by between 5-15%.
Transferring this technology to a data centre context, our cloud-based sustainability app learns the energy consumption pattern at the rack, rack Power Distribution Unit (PDU) and rack component or U level, creating an aggregated Energy Efficiency Index (EEI) for the entire data centre. The app then makes dynamic recommendations that enable you to consistently achieve your operational sweet spot.
An unrelenting focus on sustainability
These practical ways we’re helping customers operate more sustainably are underpinned by our commitment to be net zero by 2031 and our ambition to support customers to avoid using 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030. The work doesn’t stop there; we aim to embed circularity across our products, network and operations in order to keep materials in use and eliminate waste across our value chain by 2030, with this goal extending to our customers through our products and services by 2040.
Cloud unlocks powerful new routes to sustainability, and it’s essential that there are sustainability gains into every cloud innovation that is developed.
Sarwar Kahn
Sarwar Kahn is Sustainability Director for Business at BT, supporting BT’s ESG goals by embedding sustainability into its portfolio and developing new solutions and partnerships with customers to help them reduce their own carbon emissions.
