Microsoft has designed a new sustainable cloud offering to assist companies in taking charge of their carbon emissions.
The tech titan revealed Cloud for Sustainability at its annual Inspire event today. Currently in preview, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability enables organisations to “take control” of their environmental initiatives by offering it a set of integrated and automated insights to accelerate their sustainability journey.
“With Cloud for Sustainability, we’re creating a whole new category, going beyond capturing data to helping customers aggregate sustainability data in an actionable way,” stated Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft.
“It includes SaaS offerings that can discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide accurate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals, and enable intelligent insights for organisations to take more effective action”
Recent years have seen Microsoft become a driving force in corporate sustainability and environmental responsibility. In 2019 it set out its goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030 and to remove all historic carbon emissions by 2050.
Althoff cited research from Accenture that revealed 94 percent of CEOs stated that sustainability was important or very important to the future success of their businesses.
“Reducing carbon emissions and addressing environmental equity requires collective measures to understand and mitigate environmental impacts. Measuring the overall environmental impact of an organisation is particularly challenging,” he continued.
“Organisations need to be able to record their environmental footprint, report to stakeholders, reduce their resource usage, remove their footprint through carbon offsets or recycling and replace high-footprint resources with low-footprint ones”
“But doing this effectively means moving away from manually inputting data into spreadsheets, and toward a more seamless data flow via data connectors that provide automated, accurate, real-time data—and ultimately, turn those data-driven insights into action.”
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability allows CIOs to easily report on IT carbon emissions from the cloud, devices, and applications, as well as allowing companies to offer their customers a sustainability scorecard to track progress against their emission reduction goals, and enabling them to pinpoint specific emission areas and check if they are meeting their emission reduction goals in that area.
“The bottom line: Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability enables any organisation more easily and effectively to record, report, reduce and replace their emissions,” said Althoff.
“At Inspire, we are looking at how companies are building sustainability into their operations. In doing so, they are contributing new thinking and new solutions to the challenge. From digital supply chains that improve business processes and reduce carbon footprints to IoT sensors streaming real-time telemetry for predictive analytics, there is no shortage of examples of how technology can enable ambitious sustainability outcomes.”
