Sustainability considerations in your cloud strategy
Sustainability is an increasingly important performance indicator for organizations. As sustainability becomes a crucial part of organizations' operations across industries, it adds pressure from new types of stakeholders, challenges existing profit pools, and creates opportunities to open new profit pools. Organizations must respond effectively with new types of solutions and technology-enabled approaches.
This transformation is good for business. Research from multiple sources indicates that sustainability front-runners:
- Have a lower cost of capital.
- Deliver superior equity market returns.
- Can access new markets more easily by creating new types of products and services.
- Are better at managing risk and ensuring more resilient operations.
Note
Did you know that by transitioning workloads to Microsoft Azure, you can run solutions that are up to 98% more carbon efficient and up to 93% more energy efficient than on-premises options, depending on specific server usage, renewable energy purchases, and other factors?
For more information, see The carbon benefits of cloud computing.
Sustainability for your organization's brand
Customers demand that organizations and their executives, stakeholders, and investors are transparent about the environmental impact of the organization's operations. Proactively working toward sustainability helps you establish a positive brand for your organization.
A sustainable business model helps you build a good reputation. It can also build trust and attract new talent, partners, and investors. You can also strengthen your business's messaging by including communication about its sustainability model and the reasoning behind it.
Sustainability is crucial to help ensure long-term success as a player in a dynamic business space. Moving your organization toward a green business model can attract talented employees who have an active interest in sustainability.
Recommendations:
Consider these recommendations to incorporate sustainability in favor of your corporate brand.
- Make sustainability a part of your mission statement. Consider adding sustainability and environmental responsibility to your mission statement. Align brand values with your business's activities and practices.
- Share sustainability reports. Make your sustainability commitments and the progress you make toward them transparent by publicly sharing annual sustainability reports. For more information, see the 2024 environmental sustainability report from Microsoft.
Incorporate sustainability into your cloud strategy
Consider some of the benefits of using the cloud in combination with and to drive your sustainability efforts:
- Meet regulatory compliance requirements.
- Help your organization reduce carbon emissions by using modern cloud tools.
- Use resources more efficiently.
- Reduce your environmental footprint by migrating from on-premises to cloud datacenters.
- Increase revenue by optimizing your technical landscape.
- Reduce operating costs by driving efficiency.
- Improve brand trust by driving sustainability and green IT practices.
- Achieve sustainable outcomes by combining financial efficiency and cost optimization. Cost optimization often represents a greater sustainability posture.
Recommendations:
Consider these recommendations to make your cloud strategy more sustainable.
- Build green teams. Establish goals and metrics for teams that own sustainability in your organization. Metrics can include greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprint data, water use, and energy consumption. Consider gamification that motivates teams to find the most sustainable solutions.
- Understand your emissions by scope. Evaluate your end-to-end supply chain to ensure that you account for Scope 3 emissions. Read Greenhouse gas emissions to help you understand what factors contribute to your organization's emissions.
- Educate your workload teams. Use the Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainable workload guidance to help teams understand the best practices for enhancing workloads while reducing the environmental footprint.
- Consider gamification. Introduce gamification and create friendly competition between teams that motivates them to find the most sustainable solutions. Track records like the Software Carbon Intensity specification to promote green initiatives and workloads.
- Incorporate AI to accelerate your sustainability efforts. Learn how AI can help transform your organization's sustainability efforts. For more information, see Accelerating Sustainability with AI: Innovations for a Better Future.
Azure facilitation
Consider these Azure-specific recommendations to help you drive sustainability efforts.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability: Accelerate progress toward sustainability and business growth by bringing together environmental, social, and governance capabilities. These capabilities are available across the Microsoft cloud portfolio and with solutions from global partners. For more information, see What is Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability?.
Microsoft Sustainability Manager: Use the data intelligence and comprehensive, integrated, and automated sustainability management capabilities that Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides.
Azure carbon optimization: Measure and minimize the carbon impact of your Azure resources by using Azure carbon optimization.
Emissions savings estimator for Microsoft Cloud: Use this tool to define your on-premises infrastructure workloads. Then, use that information to report your current on-premises footprint and comparable Azure footprint. For more information, see the emissions savings estimator for Microsoft Cloud.
Emissions impact dashboard: Evaluate your carbon emissions, and emissions that you saved that are associated with using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 cloud services. The emissions impact dashboard can help you make targeted decisions.
Related resources
- Check out the Sustainability Executive Playbook.
- Read more about how the commitment to a planet-sized challenge helps Microsoft plan and achieve sustainability goals.
- Read how Microsoft measures datacenter water and energy use to improve Azure Cloud sustainability.
- See how The carbon benefits of cloud computing, a study on the Microsoft cloud in partnership with WSP, supports research on how moving on-premises datacenters to the Microsoft cloud can significantly reduce carbon footprints.
Next step
After informing your strategy about the vital aspects of your cloud adoption initiatives, you're ready to move on to the planning phase.