Today, we have the tools, the technologies and the expertise to reduce carbon emissions from your IT infrastructure by up to 90%. With the right green-IT strategy, based on cloud optimization, and the right partner, it’s possible to decarbonize your company almost immediately.
But that investment in cloud-native transformation isn’t just the springboard to decarbonizing your IT infrastructure. It’s also the essential first step in reducing the emissions of your entire company, in areas as diverse as facilities management, logistics and manufacturing.
How can cloud IT help decarbonize areas outside of IT? Flexible, scalable, cloud technologies, particularly those which use AI, can analyze all your workflows and processes to find inefficiencies and opportunities for decarbonization. Once you’ve identified these opportunities, you can use intelligent monitoring and reporting to create, implement and monitor your decarbonization plan.
But what does it mean in practice?
Using investment in green IT as a springboard to decarbonize your whole enterprise means taking the intelligence of the cloud and applying it across all business units. For instance, you might deploy your intelligent cloud technologies to:
- Use connected sensors to gather data from the factory floor that enables you to optimize machine operations and maintenance schedules to minimize emissions.
- Use telematics and AI-driven smart scheduling to optimize logistics operations, from driving styles, through vehicle utilization, as a way of cutting transport emissions.
- Use cloud-based analytics and digital twins — exact data models of real-life infrastructure — to optimize the energy efficiency and utilization of office buildings.
All these processes are powered by the intelligent cloud technologies acquired as part of the IT optimization process. These cloud systems run the backends which collect, analyze and find patterns in the data from your factory floor, spot opportunities to cut the emissions (and costs) associated with your vehicle fleet — and so on.
And, of course, you can continue to use the flexibility and scalability of cloud technology to keep your IT running at peak energy and carbon efficiency. When you need new resources, you can bring them online instantly, in the most emissions-efficient way possible. And when you no longer need them, you spin them down right away, instantly cutting emissions again.
Decarbonization is a journey, not a destination
Cloud technologies are the key to successfully implementing an ongoing process of data-driven emissions optimization, as a pathway to reaching net zero (and being able to demonstrate that this is something your company is doing).
This is important, because decarbonization is not, and never can be, a one-off process. It’s a journey. To successfully decarbonize, a company might start on the factory floor. But its efforts to cut emissions must then expand to include logistics, the office facilities, the sales function — the whole enterprise. This is a long process, implying a journey.
But even that is not the end of the story. In any operation with so many moving and constantly changing parts, even if you decarbonize every process and workflow, you can’t simply stop and rest easy. The moment you stop monitoring any process or workflow, it will start to drift away from optimum performance and emissions will rise.
The answer is to treat decarbonization as a journey without end, a constant process of monitoring and ongoing optimization. Typically, this journey will have the following stages:
- Audit your organization’s carbon footprint (IT and non-IT), and plan for how to reduce it using data-based approaches. Forecast milestones and build KPIs into your plan.
- Start by optimizing your IT infrastructure using cloud transformation. Then use your new cloud capabilities to optimize the rest of your business, incrementally.
- Use the forecasts, KPIs and action plan you have developed to monitor, measure and optimize your progress towards net zero.
- Keep doing this, across the whole company, continually optimizing — creating a virtuous circle of ever-increasing efficiencies.
Next steps
To get these kinds of benefits, you need to work with a market-leading cloud-services company. Only in this way can you get access to the technology but also to the skills you need to optimize.
Cloudreach is the world’s leading independent multi-cloud services company, specializing in cloud application development and cloud migration. We have the experts, the tools and the technology required to help you cut your IT emissions starting right away and to then go beyond IT and start reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the entire company.
Get in touch today to discuss your green-IT and emissions-reduction plans.
