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Overview of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability reference architectures

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Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is a comprehensive and extensible solution that helps organizations manage their sustainability efforts. We empower organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth. We achieve this objective by bringing together a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities. These capabilities are across the Microsoft Cloud portfolio, plus solutions from our global ecosystem of partners.

The solutions in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability are scalable, reliable, and aligned with industry best practices. The reference architectures provide an input into how system administrators, enterprise architects, and IT managers collaborate and communicate effectively to implement Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. The reference architectures also help to reduce the risk of errors and oversights during the design and development process, because they provide a clear set of guidelines to follow.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability offers role-specific solutions, for those teams and individuals that are responsible for sustainability programs, and for every team member. These solutions are delivered on the Microsoft cloud, bringing the trust, security, privacy, and compliance that organizations expect. Key role specific solutions are as follows:

A diagram showing the logical architecture of microsoft cloud for sustainability

  • For Everyone: Copilot and AI are being integrated into every solution component of the Cloud for Sustainability. This integration helps bring awareness, automation, and recommendations, driving faster decision-making to transform data, report and disclose, and unlock ESG data, turning insights into action.
  • Data roles: For users tasked with managing ESG related data, Sustainability data solutions in Fabric, a set of sustainability specific extensions that come included as part of Microsoft Fabric licensing, provides key capabilities to centralize and unlock data insights.
  • Sustainability & Finance roles: For Sustainability practitioners and finance teams managing the operations front, Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides core capabilities for managing their ESG program and progress. For small business users who use Microsoft Business Central as their ERP, we have a set of capabilities designed to simplify the process for emissions tracking, and our new capability for external reporting to generate disclosure reports in various standards such as CSRD, SASB, IFRS, BRSR, etc.
  • IT roles: Finally, in helping to ensure more sustainable IT operations, Emissions Impact Dashboard, and Azure carbon optimization capabilities provide the emissions data generated by using the Microsoft Cloud. This data enables better decision making in using these cloud resources in a more efficient and sustainable way, ultimately reducing the emissions from IT operations.

The solutions in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability are scalable, reliable, and aligned with industry’s best practices. The reference architecture provides an input into how system administrators, enterprise architects, and IT managers collaborate and communicate effectively to implement Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions. The reference architectures also help to reduce the risk of errors and oversights during the design and development process, because they provide a clear set of guidelines to follow.

A diagram showing the technical architecture of microsoft cloud for sustainability

Detailed Architecture of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability with key functionalities is as follows:

A diagram showing the detailed architecture of microsoft cloud for sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability offers a range of cloud-based solutions designed specifically for sustainability. This guide introduces each of those cloud solutions in detail:

Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Microsoft Sustainability Manager is a SaaS experience built on Power Platform that enables organizations to record, report, and reduce their environmental impact across operations and the value chain in areas such as Carbon, Water, Waste, and Energy.

In Carbon accounting, Sustainability Manager allows users to calculate the Organization’s carbon footprint and value chain emissions including Scope 1, 2, and 3 (across all Greenhouse Gas protocol categories). It supports detailed water data recording, analyzing balance between water sources and usage, and caters to regulatory reporting needs.

It also helps manage and report on waste data, tracking the volume and specific properties of waste, ensuring compliance with regulations. In addition, the Sustainability Manager provides a range of tools to help companies set sustainability goals, track progress, and report on their sustainability performance. It offers real-time insights into emissions, water, and waste data, promoting reliable reporting and collaboration with AI and Copilot capabilities. Core functional capabilities offered by the Sustainability Manager are:

  • Activity data ingestion and ESG value chain
  • Calculation module
  • Aggregation and reporting insights on the outcome of emissions, water, and waste
  • Goal management, and what-if analysis to track and forecast the emissions impact
  • ESG disclosure reporting for various standards such as CSRD, ASRS, BRSR, GRI, IFRS 1 and 2, SASB etc.

To learn more about Sustainability Manager, refer to the Product documentation

Sustainability data solutions in Fabric

Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (SDS-F) provide unique capabilities to ingest, harmonize, and process disparate enterprise data systems, such as Environmental, Social, Governance, and Finance. These solutions standardize data in a comprehensive data estate in Microsoft Fabric OneLake to prepare ESG metrics, datasets, and functions to aid advanced analytics and AI functions for specific sustainability scenarios.

With Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, you can:

  • Ingest ESG data from data sources such as business systems, unstructured data, semi-structured data, sensor data, and non-Microsoft datasets to build a standardized ESG data estate.
  • Incorporate your Microsoft-related emissions data from Azure and Microsoft 365. You can then use Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric’s transformation framework to prepare for analytics and reporting.
  • Enrich your ESG data using external datasets across various sustainability categories like Social, governance, environmental, biodiversity, climate risk, and finance.
  • Use the standardized ESG data estate in Microsoft Fabric, a unified analytics platform, for AI-powered insights.
  • Connect your ESG data with Power BI reporting templates aligned to ESG data models and customize the Power BI reports focusing on specific metrics and targets.
  • Connect your ESG data to reporting templates aligned to Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) for faster insights and reporting on CSRD metrics.

To learn more about Sustainability data solutions in Fabric, refer to the Product documentation

Emissions Impact Dashboard

Emissions Impact Dashboard provides customers with transparency into the emissions data related to their use of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

To learn and deploy Emissions Impact Dashboards for Azure and Microsoft 365, refer to the Product documentation

Purview Compliance Manager (PCM)

Purview Compliance Manager provides CSRD templates to help customers track required actions and document evidence for their CSRD reporting and compliance activities.

To learn and generate CSRD reports from PCM, refer to the Product documentation