No one needs convincing that there is a climate change happening. Record high temperatures, catastrophic forest fires and changing weather patterns are being evidenced worldwide. And it is expected to deteriorate if the practices causing them continue unchecked.
But there is a silver lining. For the last few years, the level of awareness and advocacy for the sustainability has risen, and that has brought issues like ESG that were marginal for decades, front and center.
At the recent Tech Field Day event, Stephen Foskett and the attending panel of delegates, tapped into the topic of sustainability in IT. The discussion- It’s Time to Talk About Sustainability in Enterprise IT! A Field Roundtable – drills down into the heart of the sustainability movement and answers if it’s realistically a campaign in the corporate or just marketing hype designed to gain advantage over competitors.
Understanding the Acronym
ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. Together, they are a set of standards by which a company’s environmental, social and governance policies are evaluated and measured and their sustainable and ethical impacts are determined.
While ‘Environment’ in ESG has shot to stardom in the recent years, it’s counterparts have remained in the shadows.
It’s worth reminding that ESG goes beyond just environment. Stephen Foskett points this out early in the discussion. “Because it’s sustainable and green doesn’t mean it’s ESG, unless you’re addressing the social and governance aspects as well,” he said.
The Anatomy of a Crisis
The tech sector is one of the major contributors of carbon emissions in the world. It may not have surpassed the devastating impacts of industries like fashion and airline, but IT’s carbon footprint is well on the rise.
E-waste has grown YoY at an alarming rate. The crisis is thickening as a result of overproduction which leads to excess consumption and eventual wastage causing environmental pollution.
Every year millions of new computers hardware are manufactured, and with that thousands old ones are discarded. 70% of the items that end up in the landfill are prematurely decommissioned. They are still reusable and rich sources of raw materials. Just recycling these items alone can cut down significant waste production.
The other half of the problem is datacenters. Datacenters account for over 3% of the global power consumption. Servers rely on energy to run, and as the equipment heat up, they need more energy to cool down. The GHG emissions are substantial.
Records state that datacenters release 2% of the global emissions yearly. That may not sound as bad on its own, but it’s about as high as the airline industry which is decried worldwide for its CO2 emissions.
The Forces of Change
So why have we turned a blind eye to something as compelling and potentially catastrophic as this for so long? Until recently, the impacts of global warming were not palpable, or personal.
Another incentive is cost-savings. Enrico Signoretti explains, “The cost of energy is huge. So now everybody is looking at ways to reduce their energy bills. It had to touch the IT budget so dramatically for everybody to be worried about climate change. That was not the case in the past.”
So are companies only acting out of self-interest? Realistically, it makes sense for big companies like hyperscalers to hit the brakes on carbon footprint because that makes a huge difference to their margins. Low energy consumption equals lower TCO meaning, greater gains plus a bonus of emission cuts.
Looking from an economic perspective, it seems unconvincing that corporations’ environmental accountability is a manifestation of real good intensions. Companies often say they want to be more green simply motivated by the profit aspect, but a true awakening about the devastating ramifications of global warming is also underway. It’s not one isolated factor, but rather a culmination of many reasons that leads businesses down the road of sustainability.
Building more energy-efficient infrastructures is incumbent upon cloud providers because a consistent power supply is not ubiquitous. Craig Rodgers points out, “Datacenters are gigantic establishments, and they are mostly stationed in parts of the world where power disruptions are common. So, that’s one of the drivers of building energy-efficient infrastructures.”
The good thing is, sustainability and economic growth are not mutually exclusive, nor are they incompatible. They can go hand in hand and still result in controlled ecological footprints of businesses.
Sustainability Not as a Goal but a Way of Being
So is sustainability in IT worth the hype? Should companies follow the trend and invest in green technologies? Or should they work on optimizing their current infrastructures to achieve the minimum goals?
While a lot of opposing viewpoints came up during the discussion, one point singularly stood out. The panel agreed that an infrastructure overhaul is not necessarily the only path to sustainability.
Disposing off hardware while it has shelf life left in it for a more eco-friendly product is only perpetuating the problem. The best possible approach is to increase utilization, so that when a company finally makes the upgrade, they’re able to drive down power consumption substantively while ensuring that it’s a fully sustainable and an economically sound choice.
With support contracts and value tier offerings from vendors that give old and expired units new lease of life, this can be easily done today.
The takeaway is clear. Do not go for the latest and greatest technologies because it promises to be green or even better-performing, unless it truly makes sense for your infrastructure or use case.
Sustainable manufacturing has brought to the market endless choices in hardware, and they may not all be equally sustainable, but there are more choices in that respect than there ever was to upgrade to that fully green, energy-efficient and low-emission infrastructure.
Wrapping Up
Sustainability is a recurrent theme in enterprise IT today and for good reason. Datacenters are guzzling massive amounts of energy and emitting cringing levels of CO2. That puts every company in the industry under the obligation to conscientiously whittle down their numbers by adopting green, environmentally sustainable policies, be it using more power-efficient CPUs or serverless technologies, or staying away from CAPEX infrastructures by simply getting more use out of old equipment. Unsustainable practices have besmirched the IT industry’s reputation for long. It’s time organizations came together to make a concerted push towards green IT.
For more interesting takes on sustainability be sure to watch It’s Time to Talk About Sustainability in Enterprise IT! A Field Roundtable till the end, and check out more Roundtable discussions on current topics from the recent Tech Field Day event.
