Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability in 2024 release wave 2
Important
The 2024 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2024 to March 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
Overview
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners.
We continue to expand the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to meet evolving customers' needs. Looking ahead, we plan to expand the following areas:
- Copilot templates to compare your company's sustainability progress with others.
- Carbon data analysis with intelligent insights.
- Energy data import and reporting.
- Alternate emissions scenarios.
You can explore the international availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability through the Industry Cloud availability report.
For official product documentation and training for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, go to:
- Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability docs
- Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability training on Microsoft Learn
Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 2024 release wave 2
Investment areas
Analyze ESG performance against goals
We’re helping organizations establish an accurate baseline for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, and then track progress against goals. Capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability help you to continuously track progress by visualizing sustainability impact in near real-time. Use powerful data visualizations and dashboards to gain a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s impact and progress toward goals. Use insights to identify and monitor potential gaps in meeting objectives. Rich visuals illustrate the patterns and trends occurring across an enterprise and highlight areas of concern and possible solutions for goals that are at risk.
We’re investing in the following areas to analyze ESG performance against goals:
- Alternate emissions scenarios.
- Restatement threshold definition and control.
Calculate sustainability footprint
Streamline data ingestion, integration, and calculations. Provide a blend of data ingestion methods—from manual input or file imports to automated, direct connections to data sources—to collect data from any business, enterprise resource planning system, or platform. Centralize this data and calculate the emissions using specialized factors and formulas.
We’re investing in the following areas to calculate your sustainability footprint:
- We're enhancing energy data models, data import, and reporting.
- We're improving our sustainability calculation services.
Data integration and calculations
Provide a blend of data ingestion methods—from manual input or file imports to automated, direct connections to data sources—to collect data from any business, enterprise resource planning system, or platform. Centralize this data and calculate the emissions using specialized factors and formulas.
We’re investing in calculations and data integration enhancements for carbon, water, and waste, the ability to restate emissions, data approval management enhancements, and more third-party connectors.
Invest in ESG innovation
Make strategic investments to support your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Our products and services help you to deliver operational excellence, sustainability performance, and business growth.
ESG innovation solutions help identify opportunities to create efficiencies and build resilience by revamping business practices, driving the organizational and operational transformation required to build resilience in a changing economy.
Provide data governance
We're helping organizations leverage data governance to drive greater transparency, accountability, and more sustainable outcomes. Our solutions support audit activities by tracing and reporting data back to the source, including all calculations and actions taken against the data. They provide better workflow management and governance by facilitating efficient data use and sharing with prebuilt processes, policies, roles, and standards. We're growing our data governance capabilities with solutions like the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model, sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, and sustainability reporting capabilities.
Our data governance solutions operationalize corporate governance practices and performance, supporting greater transparency and accountability. They provide audit and traceability to support audit activities by tracing reporting data back to the source, including all calculations and actions taken against the data. They also deliver better workflow management and governance by providing efficient data use and sharing with prebuilt processes, policies, roles, and standards.
Report impact and progress
This capability helps your organization to gather data for disclosure metrics and prepare Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) metrics with sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. You can deliver more reliable reports about your sustainability impact and progress. Our solutions provide organizations with the capability to export accurate, timely, and comprehensive sustainability reports to demonstrate progress to stakeholders.
We enable regulatory and voluntary agency reporting templates. For example, our configurable preparatory CSRD templates ease preparation for audits and quantitative regulatory and voluntary agency reporting.
Reporting, disclosure, and automated insights
With Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, you can use dashboards and analytics to accurately report and disclose emissions data for external and internal communications, annual reports, and sustainability reports. Track performance against goals and gain actionable insights.
We’re adding more reporting capabilities for EU's Compliance Sustainability Reporting Directive and other frameworks, and AI capabilities to provide what-if analyses and other insights.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability below: