Industry
Cloud
Enabling Enterprise Agility & Resilience with a Robust Cloud Strategy
Highlights
- By virtue of their design, cloud services can reduce carbon emissions while facilitating sustainable innovation and research.
- Organisations and cloud service providers must equally leverage the possibilities of sustainable innovation on cloud to achieve higher order sustainability benefits.
- While the cost of entry for sustainability solutions may have been prohibitive, there is a surprising positive correlation between sustainability initiatives and profitability.
In this article
The big question
Australia is one of the most mature cloud markets in the world and has acted as a forerunner and early adopter of cloud services.
It is now time for Australian businesses to leverage the benefits of sustainable innovation on the cloud. In this Big Questions blog post, Blesson Gregory, Cloud Consultant, TCS Australia and New Zealand, explores the sustainable benefits of cloud services.
Leading cloud providers are enabling customers to reduce their impact on the environment by weaving in sustainability into their cloud services blueprint. They are reducing their carbon footprint and environmental impact through efficient design of their data centres at scale. Increased usage of renewable sources of power, constant updates to hardware to improve efficiencies, and recycling and water conservation at data centres all help in reducing the carbon footprint. Green possibilities of the cloud must be viewed from the lens of what is available by default from a cloud provider versus additional improvements and innovation that can be incorporated by cloud users. Enterprises must strategically adopt initiatives that deliver sustainability outcomes beyond the default green benefits of the cloud.
Leveraging the benefits of green cloud
By virtue of their design, cloud services can reduce carbon emissions while facilitating sustainable innovation and research. A report by Nat Salhstrom on reducing carbon by moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) shows that the infrastructure of AWS is more than three times more energy-efficient than the average data centre, and that continuous improvement in hardware is the key enabler for energy efficiency gains. Studies by Microsoft indicate that carbon emissions from their cloud service Azure are up to 98% lower than traditional on-premises data centres. Utilising circular waste management, 86% of waste from Google data centre operations is recycled, as per an article by Crystalloids.
While these are the default benefits of adopting cloud technology, organisations using cloud services and service providers implementing cloud technology on their behalf must equally leverage the possibilities of sustainable innovation on cloud to achieve higher order sustainability benefits. This includes operating the cloud efficiently by choosing the right instance sizes, better software development practices, and application modernisation to use cloud-native services.
Embracing new definitions of success
Taking advantage of these benefits offered by cloud services requires investment in projects for application modernisation and building sustainable cloud solutions. This requires commitment from business and technology stakeholders to move away from old application architectures and legacy models of IT operations and management. Companies typically exhibit reluctance to embark on this journey due to risk and cost concerns.
Building a clear modernisation roadmap along with a detailed business case will help businesses evaluate the true benefits of these initiatives and take informed decisions. Last year, a leading construction company in New Zealand partnered with Google Cloud to implement enterprise-grade cloud capability to run its mission-critical enterprise workloads in order to enable greater uptime and flexibility, develop its customer data strategy to create an end-to-end understanding of customer needs and behaviours, and to respond quickly to market changes and opportunities.
A key focus of cloud adoption was building a sustainable future by reducing carbon emissions and overall environmental impact. Similarly, a leading media company in Australia adopted AWS to drive greater agility across business operations, improve deployment times, increase availability and reliability of their applications, and reduce total operating costs.
It is imperative to have a sound corporate governance strategy that aligns corporate performance with global responsibility. Cloud enables these goals by harmonising the growth and transformation aspirations of a business with positive environmental outcomes. Companies can no longer choose one over the other.
According to news reports, 86% Australian industry leaders now see a positive connection between taking environmental action and profitability. Around 56% of Australian businesses now believe addressing environmental issues will be material to business results within the next five years.
Toward a sustainable future
While the cost of entry for sustainability solutions may have been prohibitive, there is a surprising positive correlation between sustainability initiatives and profitability. According to news reports, 86% Australian industry leaders now see a positive connection between taking environmental action and profitability. Around 56% of Australian businesses now believe addressing environmental issues will be material to business results within the next five years.
With sustainability at the front and centre for most business leaders, we are really seeing the fusion of technology and business strategy to support ESG targets. We are being offered a unique opportunity to reboot to a new era, an era where sustainability and prosperity are part of the same set of aspirations and success equation.
