Today, April 22 is Earth Day, a day to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Industries are releasing statements about what they’re doing to benefit the planet, and the tech sector is no exception.
Data, AI, Cloud Computing are just a few areas companies can take control of their sustainability. As businesses generate more data than ever before, the technology industry is faced with the challenge of mitigating the impact data centers and other IT Infrastructure have on the environment and on natural resource consumption. In fact, the cloud has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.
So, in celebration of Earth Day, and to aid in spreading awareness around its importance within the technology community, VMblog reached out to a few industry experts for commentary.
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Adrian Knapp, CEO & Founder, Aparavi
“Earth Day is a reminder of the importance of investing in our planet. It is a call for individuals and businesses to take action to safeguard our ecosystem. The same can be said about our data. It is time for companies to focus on their data ecosystems.
The more unstructured data a company has, the bigger the data footprint. Companies can go green by identifying redundant, outdated, and trivial data, also known as ROT data. Unaccounted for data is detrimental to the environment as it takes up space on servers and slows down processings. Companies buy disk after disk to support data growth, but come five years from now, they will run out of space and will have accumulated an abundance of disks. This process is unsustainable, increases security risks, and can cost companies millions.
A data assessment can help companies improve sustainability by scanning entire file systems and taking a deep dive into the data ecosystem. The assessment can also read the data in unstructured files and reveal content. When you understand your data, you are in control to mitigate risk, reduce costs, and create value for your organization with confidence.”
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Deepak Mohan, executive vice president at Veritas Technologies
“Twenty years ago, Earth Day was a catalyst for the IT industry to commit businesses to go digital to save trees. Today, we’re now seeing data bloat in the cloud become one of the industry’s biggest sustainability challenges as companies continue to adopt multi-cloud strategies. In fact, US Grid Emissions Factor data suggests that storing just 1 petabyte of unoptimized backup data in the cloud for one year could create as much as 3.5 metric tons of CO2 waste.
This pollution can be reduced by leveraging smart data management practices and the latest deduplication techniques. According to Veritas, this deduplication can help an organization only store what is needed and reduce energy consumption associated with storing backup data in the cloud by 95% and see a 94% reduction in its carbon footprint. For example, by using data from CarbonFootprint.com, we’ve calculated that for every petabyte of data that’s deduplicated, an organization can reduce the same amount of CO2 that would be created by driving an average family car all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole.”
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Clara Angotti, co-founder and President, Next Pathway
“It’s more important than ever to ‘go green’ in the modern world. Global climate change poses an urgent threat to everyone, and some major IT companies are taking note by moving their data centers to the public cloud. Consequently, they gain flexibility, scalability and reduce costs, while also fostering the health of their business and the environment. Data management and processing on a local server has a high carbon footprint. Moving your data operations to the Cloud reduces both the number of servers and the amount of power used, reducing your company’s carbon footprint. The Cloud is transforming the IT industry in many ways, and the positive impact it has on the environment is just one of its many advantages.”
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Linh C. Ho, Chief Marketing Officer at Zelros
“AI usage has been growing year after year in many sectors, this is particularly true for insurance and financial services, where the rate of AI adoption is the highest among all industries, up more than 37% in one year according to a report from KPMG.
We’re now relying more and more on AI solutions to solve problems and to execute tasks and power consumption has needed to increase to meet this ever growing demand. However, not all power is equal and how it originates is essential to determining the future impact of this technology on the planet.
CPU and GPU processors are now designed specifically for more and more demanding machine learning tasks. The environmental impact of this is significant, and is not getting lower anytime soon. Depending on where the servers are located, the carbon equivalent for the electricity used to power it will be different. Choosing a localisation in a country with a better carbon footprint, for example coal versus renewable energy sources, can help industries, like the insurance industry, to be more efficient, while also contributing to combat climate change.”
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Sam Thorpe, Chief Product Officer at Nitro
“In this new era of remote work, paperless solutions are quickly becoming a necessity for not only sustainability but also greater efficiency. Replacing paper processes with digital ones has obvious benefits across the workplace environmentally:
- Paperless solutions reduce paper usage, this impacts both the environment as well as having a significant budgetary impact.
- Given the difficulties of recycling the US is facing, reducing waste is a key sustainability goal. Given that 45% of business paper ends up going to waste, paperless solutions can significantly reduce the amount of waste produced in the US.
- The amount of energy used to produce one ton of paper is the same as the amount of electricity that an average household uses in over 10 months! Going paperless can help reduce a company’s energy usage and costs.
- It can reduce the need to travel with the added advantage of making documents available online, at any time, and accessible from anywhere, leading to less pollution from car emissions.
By reducing paper usage, businesses will see noticeable cost savings and can champion themselves as a “Green Company” that is preserving the environment for future generations.”
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Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore
“SingleStore salutes those who devote their time and attention to finding responsible solutions. On this Earth Day, we at SingleStore call on everyone to reaffirm their commitments to solving our climate and energy crises. Modern networks and computing draw great amounts of energy, and we understand the impact of our carbon footprint.
To combat this, we encourage companies to embrace modern database solutions, so companies can see in real-time how their operations impact the power supply, which gives them the ability to improve their energy efficiency. We also call on energy providers and utility companies to adopt smart-grid technologies, which help identify and resolve energy inefficiencies in residential and commercial settings to reduce waste.
With strong alliances between world governments and industry, we can face these environmental challenges together, to ensure a healthier, greener and successful future for everyone.”
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Steve Gottlieb, founder and CEO of Shindig
“Big Tech needs to embrace a hybrid work model – not fight it. While a lot of tech companies talk about the importance of in-person collaboration, that is outweighed by the greenhouse consequences. If Big Tech wants to make good on their environmental pledges, they’ll put their employees and the planet first by going back to a remote model.”
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Arvind Rao, Global Director, Head of Product Management and Industry Solutions of Rockwell Automation
“Current technologies available enable organizations to put the smart into smart devices, enabling the automatic report of energy consumption. With a scalable approach to energy monitoring, in the context of production, organizations can benefit from energy consumption and energy intensity information dashboards that highlight areas for improvement and optimization which allows users to identify opportunities for energy reduction. This type of approach enables organizations to leverage data to drive sustainability and productivity.
Through the implementation of solutions and services that improve capabilities in collecting supply-chain data, companies can identify and fix problems at every point of the supply chain process. With robust and measurable ESG data organizations can reengineer and redesign products to digital platforms that meet environmental-sustainability needs.”
Tom O’Reilly, VP of Sustainability of Rockwell Automation
“For the past 20 years, Rockwell Automation has been committed to promoting sustainability as part of our client’s manufacturing and digital transformation efforts as well within our own business. Most recently, Rockwell Automation declared a new net-zero goal for direct and indirect operations by 2030, joining the over 400 Fortune 500 companies that have declared net-zero goals in support of combatting climate change.
Our sustainability strategy focuses on three Cs – customers, company and community. We enable our customers to achieve their own sustainability goals; create innovative, sustainable products and solutions and foster a culture that empowers sustainability and responsibility; and providing community partners with access to resources that enhance productivity and sustainability. Effective strategies and digital technologies are key to improving the bottom line and achieving sustainable goals through connected energy operations, smart facilities and product innovation. We believe that sustainability is driven from the top, and it must be engrained in the philosophy and culture of an organization.”
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Michael Jack, CRO of Datadobi
“For almost every major corporation in the world, conforming to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies has become a top priority. From sourcing responsibly to reducing carbon footprint, businesses are increasingly being judged on whether or not they are meeting their ESG objectives.
In honor of Earth Day, it is important to remind enterprises that unstructured data plays an important role in the ESG conversation. A holistic approach to ESG involves enterprises being encouraged and enabled to move away from legacy models where data is stored in a digital ‘landfill’ and is taking up space, money, and precious resources and giving very little in return.
Organizations should be using unstructured data management solutions that allow them to monitor their key ESG indicators and take action to achieve their targets by moving data to more carbon-friendly and less polluting storage, deleting redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data, and by enabling consolidation, reuse, and earlier shutdown of hardware. By doing so, they can make the Earth a little bit greener and deliver on ESG objectives.”
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