A greener cloud is good for business
With this year’s COP26 summit, sustainability is top of mind for just about everybody in the world right now — governments, communities, citizens, as well as company leaders. As such, it was a very timely opportunity, as well as an honor, to be invited to join the Achieving a Sustainable Future Through Technology panel discussion and sharing cloud’s role in making enterprise technology more sustainable.
The green beneath the cloud
So, what’s cloud got to do with sustainability? More than you might think. Accenture’s Green Cloud research has found that migrating existing workloads to a public, private or hybrid cloud could reduce global CO2 emissions by nearly 60 million tons annually. That’s equivalent to taking 22 million gasoline-powered cars off the road.
In fact, as we discussed on the panel, all the major cloud hyperscalers are now offering energy efficient and lower-emission solutions that can make a real impact to an organization’s environmental footprint. Microsoft Azure, for example, can be 93% more energy efficient and 98% more carbon efficient than an on-premises data center.
This “green” side to the cloud sometimes gets overlooked, especially when so much of the emphasis is on cost-efficiency, enhanced performance, and innovation potential. But one of the things I was keen to highlight in our discussion was the fact that some companies are making real progress here.
Continuum Competitors show the way
Accenture’s recent research has uncovered a small group of what we call “Continuum Competitors”. These are organizations who are adapting their technology and ways of working to unleash the full benefits of the broader Cloud Continuum — which includes private clouds and technologies like edge computing and 5G, as well as the public cloud.
We found that over two-thirds of continuum competitors can do more with fewer servers. Two in five are using their servers with greater efficiency. And one-third are architecting for greener IT in the continuum than they could with a pure on-premises approach.
Overall, more than two-thirds of these continuum competitors have reduced their carbon footprint thanks to the cloud. That’s clear evidence that the continuum can deliver tangible sustainability results on the ground.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure
For any business hoping to match these impressive results, there’s one essential requirement: measurement. Put simply, you can’t claim you’ve reduced your carbon footprint if you don’t know how big it is to start with — or how much each cloud capability brings it down. And insights can help companies encourage greener actions and deliver measurable results.
As my colleague Sanjay Podder shared, this is something where many organizations still struggle to connect the dots and demonstrate the value. But it’s a precondition of unlocking the sustainability benefits of the Cloud Continuum.
This is where our new and improved Accenture myNav® platform comes in. I wrote about some of the enhancements we’ve made to myNav in a recent blog post. And one of the most important is our new Green Cloud Advisor.
The Green Cloud Advisor provides two key insights. First, it establishes a baseline of existing data center energy consumption, computing requirements and sustainability goals. Second, it uses some smart data science to quantify the “greenness” of different cloud continuum options and put real-time data into the companies’ hands, information that they never had before. With this new information, companies can make greener decisions aligned with their sustainability priorities and possibly even reduce actions that were less “green”. Understanding the implication of every technology choice is powerful, and makes for both, more responsible sustainability and technology decisions.
The Advisor can provide the essential sustainability intelligence that’s currently lacking in many organizations. And we know it works because we’ve used it in the field.
For instance, we worked with a major retailer in North America that had set itself the goal of getting to net zero by 2040. As it happens, they were also planning to exit their data centers (totaling some 7,000 servers) as part of a separate cloud migration. But the missing link for this organization was the ability to tie the two initiatives together.
By using the Green Cloud Advisor, we were able to measure the carbon impact of the retailer’s cloud migration. And it was huge — a projected reduction of around 85% compared with their data center. By quantifying that figure, supported by robust evidence, we made sure this significant step towards greater sustainability could count towards the organization’s net zero goal.
Having baselined your starting point, it’s important to keep measuring your progress towards your goal. Because the choices you make along the way can make a real difference to your sustainability.
Another client, this time an agricultural company, were also struggling to report on progress against an ambitious five-year cloud sustainability goal. Using the Green Cloud Advisor, we helped them quantify the impact of accelerating their plans, as well as understand where to target their interventions. The result? An 85% reduction in carbon emissions delivered in four years instead of five.
It takes a village…
One important point about the cloud sustainability agenda is the benefit of collaboration. Yes, you can go fast if you go it alone. But you get further if you work with partners.
So, whether it’s the public cloud hyperscalers and their various carbon-efficient solutions, or a partner like Accenture and its innovative myNav tools, a company on a cloud sustainability journey can ultimately achieve much more if it leverages a wider array of green cloud capabilities.
This speaks to an important broader point. Every organization now has its own sustainability objectives. And by working together, we can all extend the reach and impact of our initiatives — and get to those greener and more sustainable ways of working we’re all seeking.
If you’d like to know more about the Green Cloud Advisor and how it could help you use the cloud continuum to meet your organization’s sustainability targets, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me or my team.
