Our Carbon Footprint, the Impact of Cloud & Sustainability Plan
Nobody can be unaware of the ever widening conversation around sustainability and the increasingly important need to act in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. TEKenable is no exception.
We have started by engaging BluePlanet Consulting to calculate our baseline carbon footprint covering the company’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions (Transport and Buildings) and selected Scope 3 emissions (Business Travel, Employee Commuting, Water and Waste), to assess our sustainability & ESG policies and procedures and to work with us on these.
In partnership with Microsoft and Blue Planet Consulting, we hosted the Cloud for Sustainability webinar on 09 November 2022. The presenters included;
- John Curran (Blue Planet Consulting Managing Director),
- Peter Rose (TEKenable Technical Director),
- Aisling Curtis (Microsoft Strategy and Sustainability Director) and,
- Ritika Adlakha (Microsoft Technical Specialist – Business Applications)
The panel discussed the importance and environmental benefits of migrating to the cloud. The webinar also included a demo of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability platform.
Sustainable Development Goals
The assessment of our Carbon Footprint is only one aspect of Sustainability. As the image below shows the UN have defined 17 sustainable development goals and we, as a responsible company, will contribute to as many of these as possible but only 11, 12 and 13 directly relate to carbon.
The assessment of greenhouse gas emissions is made under three “scopes” which we show in the image below.
TEKenable’s Carbon Footprint Analysis
We have made the calculation for Ireland where the majority of our operations are based and will expand this to other locations in time. There is no reason to believe that other locations are materially better or worse than the below.
Scope 1
Direct emissions relating to combustion of primary fuels such as diesel, LPG etc – 8.02 tCO2e
Scope 2
Indirect emissions from Grid Electricity – 7.78 tCO2e
Scope 3
Indirect emissions from business travel, commuting, waste and water – 7.80 tCO2e
It is worth noting that, like all benchmarks, the real value in establishing a carbon footprint is less about the outcome of the exercise itself and more about the subsequent business improvement actions that it drives.
The Impact of Cloud on Sustainability
Cloud computing has the potential to generate significant operational and financial benefits for companies using it, but recently large data centers have been attracting some negative publicity around their power consumption.
Moving from many on-premises servers to fewer large data centers presents the opportunity to reduce overall IT consumption of energy and related carbon emissions. With this in mind, Microsoft commissioned a study to compare the energy consumption and carbon emissions of four applications in the Microsoft Cloud with their on-premises equivalents:
- Microsoft Azure Compute
- Microsoft Azure Storage
- Microsoft Exchange Online
- Microsoft SharePoint Online
These cloud applications together account for about half of the energy consumed in Microsoft datacenters. To gain as full and accurate a picture as possible, the study considered the full life cycle for the computing scenarios (from manufacturing to end-of-life).
The results show that the Microsoft Cloud is between 22 and 93 percent more energy efficient than traditional enterprise data centers, depending on the specific comparison being made. When taking into account renewable energy purchases, the Microsoft Cloud is between 72 and 98 percent more carbon efficient than on-premise or non-cloud data centers.
These savings are attributable to four key features of the Microsoft Cloud:
- IT operational efficiency,
- IT equipment efficiency,
- Data center infrastructure efficiency and
- Renewable electricity.
Given that the utilisation of servers in the cloud is significantly higher than on premise this gives a huge efficiency gain. Increasing the utilization rate from 10 percent to 40 percent will allow a server to process four times the previous load, while the power draw by the server may only increase 1.7 times.
Our Plans
We will continue to guide and support our customers on their cloud journey with our Cloud Services and internally as a business by developing policies in the following areas:
1. Sustainability & ESG Policy
2. Energy Policy
3. Waste Management Policy
4. Transport/Travel Policy
5. Water Management Policy
1. Sustainability & ESG Policy
2. Energy Policy
3. Waste Management Policy
4. Transport/Travel Policy
5. Water Management Policy
6. Biodiversity Policy
7. Ethical Sourcing/Trading Policy
8. Diversity and Inclusion Policy
9. Employee Health and Wellbeing Policy
We know we have a way to go on this journey but we have taken the first step and intend to continue on the journey as we know it is good for the planet, good for our employees and customers and good for TEKenable.
