Quick wins to reduce your ICT carbon footprint

In the spirit of being sustainable, I’ll get to the point of this article quickly 😊

 It’s clear from COP26 that becoming carbon neutral is no longer an option. It’s something we have to execute on now and IT is a bigger part of the problem than most people realise. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, data centres now account for 1.5% of all electricity consumption with carbon emissions last year having quadrupled to 680 million tonnes.

Congratulations, if you’ve done the sensible thing and made the move to a cloud provider that’s focussed on sustainability (or alternatively made your data centres as efficient as they can be).

The good news is that this is a great start to reduce the carbon emissions from your IT services. The bad news is that it’s only the start. You’ve taken the critical first step and focused on the sustainability “of” the cloud, but don’t forget about sustainability “in” the cloud. 

In the world of sustainability, this is a relatively new concept, but is no different to the Shared Responsibility Model used by nearly all cloud providers when discussing security. Here’s a simple version of how it looks from a sustainability perspective.

Sustainability “of” the cloud is simple to understand. The big-3 Cloud providers Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have all made great strides in using 100% renewable energy, optimising power consumption in their facilities, letting you run your applications on the most efficient hardware, leveraging their scale and efficient data centres. Microsoft and Google now both publish power consumption figures, letting you visualise your actual IT carbon footprint, even including scope-3 emissions.

Sustainability “in” the cloud is a different matter altogether and whether you like it or not remains your responsibility. Industry studies show that the average cloud consumer wastes 45% or more of their cloud resources. What this means is that even if you transition to the cloud (or optimise your own DC’s) that you’re wasting an opportunity to reduce your IT carbon footprint by nearly another 50%.

It’s time to start eliminating waste, designing your applications and services to be more energy efficient and re-thinking your approach to application design. This is where you need to start looking at the efficiency of your services, assessing the resources they are using and eliminating any waste. If you want a few hints where to start, try looking here:

• Oversized compute instances

• Services running on aged, inefficient instances

• Badly sized micro-services

• Compute instances not terminated or Dev environments left running

• Excessive retention of storage snapshots

• Data stored on the wrong tier of storage

• Services running in the wrong region/availability zone

Now there’s obviously lots more and what’s shown above is barely the tip of the iceberg, but a critical first step is to assess where you are today and build some sensible time-bound KPI’s for optimising your services based upon real actual metrics. There's also a lot you can do to work with your engineering teams to optimise code, doing that can offer some stellar benefits but obviously needs a lot of thought, planning and engineering time.

We’re happy to assist with this, but equally happy if this has got you thinking and made you realise that you have some easy wins!

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like some advice where to start looking or how to get your people taking this more seriously.