Efficient data management should be key pillar of corporate sustainability agendas

Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration for organisations, as they seek to generate business value by incorporating environmental, social, governance (ESG) factors into decision-making.

According to a 2022 Gartner survey of chief executive officers (CEOs) and senior business executives, a growing number of CEOs are identifying sustainability as a top business priority, with ESG being on the corporate agenda for about 1 in 5 organisations - the most in a decade.

Efforts to reduce carbon footprints are growing, with more companies committing to achieving net-zero emissions and adopting sustainable strategies. But, while much has been said about developing alternative sources of energy or decarbonising emissions-intensive industries, less discussion has been directed at the environmental impact of data management.

Sustainable data management practices

In today’s world, where cloud storage is readily available at an affordable price, one doesn’t think much about creating or storing data, but these actions have a burgeoning environmental cost. Data centres – which form the backbone of the digital economy – are growing to accommodate data growth; they are huge energy hogs, with everything from the servers, to the storage equipment, to the cooling infrastructure having a large appetite for electricity and water.

Global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rose 6 per cent in 2021 to 36.3 billion tonnes - their highest level ever, according to the International Energy Agency.

The insatiable appetite for data, compounded by the spikes in natural gas prices that led to an increased use of coal to meet energy demand, means carbon emissions will only soar if concerted efforts are not put in place to stem the growth. A corporation may set an emissions-reduction target, but this is not going to be met if it does not also review the emissions its information technology (IT) department produces.

If an organisation wants to reduce its environmental impact, it has to first understand how its data storage is handled. To achieve efficient data storage, the lifecycle of data needs to be intelligently managed - by determining what data can be eliminated, compressed or optimised for storage.

Processes such as the efficient management of critical applications, data and workloads, harnessing efficient backup and storage methods and optimising network transmissions can also contribute to more sustainable data management practices.

Evolution of backup technology

The rapidly evolving landscape of backup technology offers opportunities to grow our contributions to sustainability, as well as our impact on the sustainability of IT as a whole. However, with each organisation having its own objectives, targets, strategies, and policies, sustainability will mean something different to every one.

To avoid a potential disconnect between over-arching organisational sustainability strategies and what happens on an individual department level, organisations should review the environmental impact that each department has. In the case of IT, this will be focused on core elements such as how they manage critical applications, back up their data and store non-relevant business data.

Part of the environmental impact created by the IT department - specifically, emissions - will be due to how it chooses to back up data. Organisations are increasingly using the cloud as a core backup infrastructure, because it is more sustainable. It has been determined that cloud data centres, dynamically allocating resources across customers’ workloads on the cloud, can achieve higher resource utilisation and energy efficiency. This translates into a smaller carbon footprint for the same workload.

Reviewing the storage or backup of unnecessary data is also important. Today, a significant proportion of businesses know they are storing irrelevant data but have made little or no effort to delete or remove it. Filtering data that is not needed should become a moral imperative for anyone wanting to reduce their environment impact.

Deploying backup technology efficiently

As companies continue to embrace multi-cloud strategies, data bloat in the cloud is becoming a big sustainability challenge. Data gathered from the US Environmental Protection Agency suggests that storing just 1 petabyte of unoptimised backup data in the cloud for 1 year could create as much as 3.5 metric tons of CO2 waste.

Using unified data management, along with elastic backup from snapshots and advanced deduplication techniques (which are ways of eliminating redundant data), will allow organisations to store only what is needed; it can reduce the energy consumption associated with storing backup data in the cloud by 95 per cent and result in a 94 per cent reduction in an organisation’s carbon footprint.

This means that for every petabyte of data that’s deduplicated, an organisation can reduce the same amount of CO2 that would be created by driving an average family car all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole. 

Downside to piecemeal solutions

Data protection is another key pillar of data management that can lead to wasteful storage practices. It is easy for organisations to end up with a patchwork of data protection solutions in the cloud, when individual workloads and applications are managed in silos.

This scattershot approach adds cost and a management burden that quickly becomes unsustainable at scale. To avoid this, organisations need to use the right tools to reduce their cloud footprint and control the environmental impact of their data storage, while keeping their data safe from ransomware and paving the way to autonomous data management.

Advancing sustainability agendas

Rapid digitalisation, with the corresponding data deluge, is putting a tremendous strain on the planet. It is imperative to start using a green lens to assess data management practices, to ensure that companies and individuals alike move towards shaping a more sustainable future.

By adopting sound cloud-based data management, including solutions for deduplicating data and eliminating multi-cloud storage inefficiencies, organisations can be on the right track in advancing their sustainability agenda.

The writer is vice-president and managing director for the Asia Pacific and South Region at Veritas Technologies.