Enterprise tech transitions for a more sustainable world

THE challenges posed by climate factors and global warming are becoming too real for businesses and individuals to ignore. According to the Business Continuity Institute, 42 per cent of businesses have identified extreme weather as having disrupted their supply chains, and some industries such as agriculture and construction bear a huge brunt of drastic climate change.

In Gartner’s 2022-2023 CEO priorities report, business chiefs for the first time put environmental sustainability in their top 10 business priorities. Beyond the positive impact on the larger collective, sustainability makes business sense when investors and customers’ expectations increasingly factor in environmental awareness and action.

Three out of four CEOs responding to Gartner’s study agreed that increasing environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives help attract investors, and 80 per cent mentioned environmental suitability as the largest decision driver when investing in new or improved products over the next two years.

Technology products and solutions are no exception when IT systems have such a heavy impact on the environment. Data centres account for more than 3 per cent of global electricity consumption, and cloud computing has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry. But while technology is resource-hungry, it is also the key to environmental progress.

Move to the cloud

Aiming to become more agile and efficient, businesses have been accelerating their adoption of cloud solutions. Although it may sound counterintuitive, cloud computing is helping reduce the energy consumption related to technology.

Emissions associated with technology are generally increasing because the usage and adoption of digital services is growing exponentially among organisations and society. But if this growing usage was sustained by private hardware and data centres individually owned and managed by each organisation using and/or providing technology solutions, this footprint would be significantly larger than it currently is. Cloud providers can service thousands of organisations and millions of individuals with resources hosted in just a few larger data centres across the globe.

The development of larger cloud platforms delivering a wider range of tech services is also helping organisations consolidate their technology stacks. Replacing a dozen individual solutions with a single tech platform can help reduce costs, and achieve a more sustainable tech ecosystem.

In a world running on cloud solutions and applications, most of the necessary processing will be centralised in large data centres scattered across the globe. The companies managing those data centres are constantly conducting research and coming up with optimisations and innovations to reduce their carbon footprint that individual organisations likely couldn’t afford if they had to manage these environments on their own.

Progress is being made in better understanding the environment and temperature at which all this hardware requires the least energy to run. Other key areas of improvement include better cooling systems, green building certifications, recycling or reusing equipment to reduce waste, using renewable energy, better water management, or a more dynamic management of computing resources.

By centralising the computing capacity the world’s technology requires, and leaving it in the hands of specialists whose sole purpose is to optimise this environment, we are managing to keep the impact on our grids from blowing up.

AI finger on the green pulse

Technology is and will be a key factor in building a cleaner world. It isn’t just about technologies or solutions developed specifically for sustainability purposes, but also about building the tech infrastructures that enable measurement and progress. Setting an organisation on a cleaner path requires an initial assessment of its footprint, from which sustainability goals can be defined, and capabilities to track progress towards these goals.

This can’t be achieved without implementing sophisticated data collection and AI/analytics capabilities at all levels of an organisation, which is why technology leaders are playing an increasingly important role in their organisation’s ESG journey. Being able to measure the green progress creates transparency and accountability. These capabilities used to be available only to the world’s largest organisations, but their democratisation is creating a world better equipped to drive its progress towards a greener future.

Organisations have to consider the central role IT and tech decisions can play in reducing their overall carbon footprint. Humanity’s window to make this planet liveable in the long term is closing fast, and organisations and businesses have the opportunity to make an impact at their own level.

The writer is vice-president and head of Asia-Pacific at Netskope