July 2023, with its record-breaking heat waves, was a red flag for everyone to properly address climate change and adopt sustainable lifestyle and business practices. Over 61,000 people died in Europe’s record-shattering heat wave last summer. Heat kills more people in the U.S.  than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined. 

Climate change has been attributed to many sources – burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, beef production, among others. The tech industry has contributed with its use of energy, water, and materials, producing between 2-3% of the global carbon emissions in 2021, according to the UN’s Environment Programme — comparable with global aviation. The Big Five tech companies, AlphaBet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft consume as much electricity as the population of New Zealand.

As more and more people are committed to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles and leveraging their purchasing power, more companies are selecting vendors who have sustainable IT products and services. Buyers are now choosing to partner with sustainable companies, and reduce their carbon footprint. Gartner expects that by 2025, 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization.

Challenges to going green 

No matter how much users and organizations want to adopt green practices, the reality is that they must balance various considerations. The IT market has generally prioritized the development of smaller, faster components and devices, rather than environmentally friendly ones. For a large organization, security and governance may be a greater consideration than environmental impact when purchasing its servers and infrastructure. Other considerations are how to achieve optimum performance and low latency in multi cloud environments while still meeting data driven sustainability goals. 

As almost all organizations still hold 70% of data and apps in their data centers with the rest on the cloud, creating a hybrid configuration. Many of the companies usually use more than one cloud and now may incorporate edge computing, so they are dealing with complex configurations and performance issues. Achieving sustainability that does not impact performance, increase latency or impact availability, and that is also balanced with governance and costs, is a tough balancing act. 

Big Tech’s Sustainability Record

What’s the record of big tech until now? Big tech companies are actively involved in building new wind and solar projects, and are buying Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). In 2022, Amazon secured 10.9 gigawatts of clean energy. Three years prior to that, it initiated its Climate Pledge, affirming its commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across its entire business operations by 2040, and aims to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. However, in August 2023 it was removed from the Science Based Targets Initiative list because, according to Bloomberg, it failed to set a credible target for lowering its emissions. 

Google has matched 100% of their annual global electricity use with renewable energy purchases, for the past six years, during which the business continued to grow. Another goal is to run on carbon-free energy (CFE) 24/7, and to achieve net-zero emissions across all operations and value chain by 2030. Microsoft committed to be carbon negative in 2020, and water positive and zero waste by 2030. They have taken a slightly different approach and vow to protect more land than they use by 2025 and protect the environmental health of the communities that host their data center operations and where their employees live and work. 

Apple’s goal to make every product carbon neutral by 2030 is on its way, for example the MacBook Air with M2 uses 40 percent total recycled and renewable content. Meta has maintained net zero emissions in their global operations since 2020 and are committed to reaching  net zero emissions across their value chain in 2030. 

Data-driven sustainability initiatives

As this critical summer has shown, tech should accelerate the drive towards net-zero emissions. In contrast to the typical competitive market, when it comes to the environment, a joint effort is required – we’re all in this together! Scientists and climate experts must now endorse a rapid and simultaneous adoption of technology-led solutions, to create a unified view of existing energy consumption and proportional emissions to enable decarbonization on a global scale.

Many players in the tech industry have undertaken efforts to reduce their environmental impact such as onboarding renewable energy, reducing water usage, using recycled materials and designing more energy-efficient products. Initiatives like “Transform to Net Zero” set a clear target to cut Green House Gases (GHG) emissions by 50% by 2030. The governing principles convert commitments to action plans with focused efforts on data-led innovation, policy engagement, transparency, and accountability. 

Using newer technologies for data driven sustainability initiatives 

Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI can make a significant difference in many areas of the energy generation and consumption on which the tech runs, such as accurate renewable energy forecasting, optimized operations, stabilized energy grids, sustainable energy assets distribution, and shaping tomorrow’s interconnected energy systems. On the downside, Generative AI requires significant compute power that may negatively impact sustainability goals, and no solution as of now has been put forward to solve this critical issue. 

IoT technology offers real-time data from multiple sources, that combined with powerful AI-backed analytics, presents enterprise-wide data in a single pane view. Enterprises can use this data as an accurate prediction model that predicts their contribution to global emissions and the associated costs, both financial and environmental. With this information, companies can create an action plan to offset the emissions, and fine-tune it to meet the combined goals of sustainability and business value generation.

Digital twin software

Digital twin software creates a replication of a physical asset in the virtual environment, including its functionality, features, and behavior. Companies can use the digital representation to monitor resource consumption, boost production efficiencies, and plan green energy production upgrades. Digital twin software can then accelerate the transition to cleaner energy, enabling more informed emissions reduction and clean energy adoption decisions.

Real time responses 

Organizations need to closely monitor energy consumption and obtain notification of unusual spikes or activity that could indicate issues that need to be addressed. An operational data hub can assist, as it integrates data from a variety of disparate sources including data centers, IoT and the cloud, to offer a single source of truth that enables quick responses to various events. This holistic approach enables organizations to gain a comprehensive perspective on their environmental impact. 

Efficient data storage 

Organizations require high-impact insights, and removing extraneous data helps to keep systems lean, which can promote faster response times, in addition to assisting with reduced environmental impact. GigaSpaces Tiered Storage places priority data in RAM, for read/write operations that require the fastest access. Data that is read-only and is less frequently used can be placed in the warm tier, usually SSD, so that most processing is directed to RAM without involving the entire data stack, also limiting energy consumption. 

Last words

Implementing data driven sustainability in cloud, on-premises and hybrid workloads involves first understanding the impacts of the services that will be used, then quantifying those effects throughout the workload’s lifecycle, and finally implementing the best practices and design principles that will minimize those impacts. But best practices for the tech side are not enough for a successful implementation; buy-in from all stakeholders is key to rolling out and maintaining a successful data driven sustainability effort.