And while information technology may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “climate change,” the role of technology in greenhouse gas emissions is increasing. That means IT leaders still have work to do in the area of sustainability.
Here, Matt Buchner, senior director of cloud solutions architecture at NTT Data Services, an IT service management company headquartered in Plano, Texas, discusses some considerations about green IT and why it’s important to think about the environmental costs of the technology itself if it is available, it is done via the cloud.
How can CIOs and IT leaders integrate environmental sustainability into operations?
Matt Buchner: Ideally, a sustainability initiative starts at the board and C-level. Part of a company’s emissions come from its IT workloads, so a specific IT plan must be defined.
The first step is to measure how much CO2 your IT workloads emit. This gives you something to work with.
IT needs to develop a goal, a plan that can then be implemented to make IT workloads more sustainable. It takes work and effort to make IT more sustainable. It’s not magic.
So we need to think about all the benefits that can come from switching to Green IT, and this is about more than just saving CO2.
Sustainability, for example, is one way to stand out from the competition. What we are seeing in the market right now is a huge challenge to find talent. You can use a good sustainability plan as a unique selling point to attract talent to the company.
There are many reasons to develop and implement a plan, but then the question arises: How do you actually do it? Migrating to the cloud can be a good first step as cloud providers tend to be more efficient when it comes to power management and cooling.
Matt Buchner
If you really want to continue optimizing, you need to modernize your applications. This requires more time and more effort, but is proportional to the benefits. For example, one aspect of a modernized application is scalability. Instead of running a set number of servers 24/7 regardless of workload, you can increase or decrease this number and change server specifications as needed. And by only turning on servers when you need them – just like a light – you reduce your emissions.
If you want to get more benefits, you need to shrink the applications. Let’s say you’re running an application that has a lot of software, is very complex, is constantly computing, and the CPU is running hot and the fans are spinning very fast. If you can make the same application much smaller and lighter, it’s much more environmentally friendly. Container, serverless and event-driven architectures require much less space than traditional applications.
When you get into machine learning, there are completely different things to consider. Machine learning can use a lot of computing power to build models. Although machine learning is nothing new, its adoption is now exploding with cloud technologies. There are legacies and modern implementation approaches. You can reuse pre-trained models, so you don’t have to do the calculation from scratch every time. This can save you a lot of time, energy and money.
What is a potentially overlooked aspect of green IT goal-setting that CIOs and other IT leaders should keep in mind?
Büchner: You might say, “I want to reduce my emissions by 50% in two years.” But if your business has grown three times in two years, your computing needs have increased significantly. And yet you still have to reduce your emissions. So it can be a real challenge. A more achievable goal is to adjust emissions targets based on company size.
If we track, measure and educate people about sustainability and technology issues, we will be in a better position.
The [overarching] It is the goal Achieve net zero emissions. But that will take some time. If you look at the commitments of the cloud providers, we expect it to take five to ten years to rely on 100% green energy. In addition, results of the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA) 2021 show that Most companies haven’t even set their initial emissions reduction targets, let alone net zero targets. The CSA found that only 23.7% of respondents have set a net-zero emissions target. The first step is to set these goals and make emissions reduction commitments within the organization.
Sustainability is not just about CO2, but also about water consumption, for example, as a lot of water is used to cool data centers. If you look at cloud providers’ sustainability pages, they discuss emissions but also set data center water consumption targets are consuming Billions of gallons of water.
How can IT teams start measuring their carbon emissions?
Büchner: If you use [a large cloud provider such as] AWS or Azure, then you will find a dashboard in the console that shows you how much CO2 you emit. If you don’t have such a dashboard, you can use the calculations to determine how much energy you are using.
What about organizations that are currently on site?
Büchner: You may know how much energy you use in kilowatts because it is part of your bill. And then you can calculate your emissions from this.
Part of it is knowing whether electricity is generated by windmills, solar farms or nuclear power plants – and in these casesthere will be much less CO2. If the energy is generated by coal-fired power plants or gas-fired power plants, more CO2 is produced. So you have to look at how this energy is generated locally.
Using cloud services will not eliminate environmental problems – companies will still have outdated technical e-waste, for example – and cloud computing comes with me other environmental costs. What could be helpful with these topics?
Büchner: [Among its benefits]I believe the cloud has the advantage of shared hardware. But I would like to say, contrary to my fondness for the cloud, that things in the cloud are so easy to use. You can just click or go online and boom, you are now using a lot of cloud resources.
In a data center you can walk into the server room, you can feel the heat, you can hear the fans. Someone who has never set foot in a data center can now run large computer servers. The use of technology is so abstract that we can forget what it takes to power it behind the scenes.
That is our job in IT: to educate and ensure that people are aware of the technology made available to them and can use it sensibly. Technology is made so easy [its energy use] can be abused. But if we track, measure and educate people about the issues surrounding sustainability and technology, we will be in a better position.
How can IT teams in particular start to become more aware of their environmental footprint?
Büchner: It’s one thing to see how much energy you’re already using. The next stage of Green IT is to estimate future consumption for a specific application and select accordingly. If you have two options that are similar in performance, but one is more environmentally friendly than the other, you can make a decision based on this information.
[If you’re using a cloud service]Use automatic server shutdowns. Some of the IT cloud services have a built-in automatic shutdown feature. For example, AWS Cloud9 is a service that by default automatically goes to sleep if it is not used for 30 minutes. If you look at the servers you already run, there are probably many that aren’t actually being used. You need to look into this and make sure the servers are shut down [when not in use]so configure an intervention or automatic shutdown option. This is not always built-in and you need to implement and test it, but it can result in significant cost and emissions savings.
When migrating to the cloud, it’s important to pay close attention to the cloud region where your data will be stored. Network emissions factors are an important part of the cloud carbon footprint. Grid emissions factors list the type of local energy sources that cloud regions use to power their infrastructure, and each cloud region has different levels of carbon emissions efficiency. Of course, other factors like data locality, latency and price also come into play, but choosing the most efficient region will have a significant impact on your overall workload emissions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
