IT sustainability beyond the data center

Optimization, efficiency, and transformation are concepts that business leaders today live by. Not just because they’re advantageous to the business, but also because they benefit the environment. In fact, executives increasingly are incorporating environmental sustainability into the core of their business.

As organizations create and pursue sustainability roadmaps, there’s a critical lever that can help them achieve better outcomes both for their business and for the environment: digital technologies, which are a growing source of carbon emissions for companies of all sizes and in all sectors.

There are typically 4 interrelated sources of carbon emissions within information technology (IT) organizations that can be addressed with targeted sustainability efforts:

• Data centers: Collectively, data centers around the world consume 200 to 250 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s roughly 1% of global electricity demand and approximately 0.3% of all global carbon emissions.
• Big data analytics: A principal driver of demand for data center capacity—and for electricity with which to power data centers—is the voracious appetite for data-driven analytics to assist in decision-making, coupled with the accessibility of both on-premises and cloud-based computing power.
• Security: As data infuses ever more business processes and decisions, the need for security grows accordingly. Encryption mechanisms, application security, blockchain, and CPU-intensive algorithms require more computation, which increases the energy demands of software as well as its carbon footprint.
• Internet usage: Global internet traffic surged by more than 40% in 2020. This growth is on top of the increased demand for digital services before the pandemic: since 2010, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled and global internet traffic has expanded 15-fold.  As internet traffic continues to increase, so will IT emissions.

Because of technology’s environmental impact, green IT—the use of environmentally friendly tools and practices by IT operations—is emerging as the new poster child of corporate social responsibility.

As technology becomes a catalyst for sustainability, cloud computing—and hybrid cloud, in particular—will be pivotal to the success of enterprise sustainability initiatives.

With hybrid cloud, organizations can create the visibility, integration, and capabilities they need to drive sustainable outcomes.

And yet, the environmental impact of cloud itself can be significant: cloud-based software runs on computers and mobile devices but actually lives on hardware in remote data centers. Although the software itself does not consume energy, the hardware on which it relies—including processors, memory, storage, and networks—most certainly does.

Hybrid cloud enables green IT initiatives

Hybrid cloud opens up new opportunities for sustainable IT strategies. Instead of a narrow focus on the energy efficiency and emissions of individual servers or data centers, it allows CIOs to focus on improving the sustainability of their entire cloud estate and IT operations. As CIOs expand their focus on reducing the carbon footprint of their organizations, they can leverage hybrid cloud for their data, workloads, and applications, helping reduce energy consumption across the enterprise.

But deploying hybrid cloud to the shared benefit of Earth and the enterprise is not as easy as flipping a switch. Rather, it requires a keen understanding of IT’s environmental impact, the fundamental challenges facing green IT initiatives, and the critical levers that organizations can pull to make their IT more sustainable—not only within carbon-intensive data centers, but across their IT operations.

Download the report to see how hybrid cloud can enable energy savings across the enterprise and help organizations achieve their environmental sustainability goals.