10 Earth-Friendly Facts about Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure

Brian Janous, Utility Architect
Data Center Advanced Development

Earth Day is Monday, April 22, providing a moment to reflect on the daily work we are doing to drive greater environmental sustainability at Microsoft and for our customers, partners, and the industry.  While Earth Day is only a single day, sustainability is a year-round effort for my Data Center Advanced Development team, as well as our extended teams from Global Foundation Services, Environmental Sustainability, Microsoft Research, and all our cloud services groups.

Microsoft has an environmental strategy that spans the entire company and is focused on reducing the impact of our own operations and accelerating the use of information technology in addressing environmental issues. As part of the team responsible for operating one of the world's largest cloud infrastructures, we proudly support this strategy.

In honor of Earth Day, I've highlighted ten environmental-related facts about the data centers Microsoft builds and operates (see graphic).  This list represents countless hours people have dedicated in our data centers to research, develop, and implement approaches that help drive efficiency and sustainability in our cloud-scale infrastructure.

At Microsoft, our sustainability efforts are focused on doing more with less. We strive to continually deliver higher-quality services, to more customers, over more regions of the globe at a lower cost and with less impact to the environment.  As the director of Energy Strategy, I'm measured by my own team's ability to make improvements in how our data centers source power and how we manage our infrastructure's overall system energy efficiency. By continually considering efficiency in our infrastructure management and the power sources we choose, we often experience the dual benefit of reduced costs and sustainability improvements including power consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions.

We recognize the impact our growing infrastructure has on the company's footprint, but we're also well aware of the benefits cloud computing has on our global society. This latter point is often overlooked as discussions often focus on the footprint of data centers alone, while failing to note the efficiency gains afforded by cloud services.  Our cloud infrastructure enables our customers to do more with less.  Less servers.  Less Energy.  Less environmental impact.  And while we continue to make progress in driving efficiencies in our own operations, we know that more opportunities exist, and look forward to sharing more about our journey with you in the future.

To learn more about our approach to sustainability in Microsoft's data centers, download our new Strategy Paper and watch our new video.  Additionally, visitMicrosoft's environmental sustainability web site and check out their latest blog post of the EPA recognizing Microsoft as a top green power purchaser.

Have a great Earth Day! 

- Brian Janous, Director, Energy Strategy

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2014
  Sean James, Senior Research Program Manager Global Foundation Services
  
  
  Last November we announced