“We can always
tell when a new data center comes online.”
These words were from a large electric
utility manager during a casual conversation we were having about energy
management. The manager was referring to the spike in energy utilization that
the utility saw whenever a new data center was added to the system.
Data centers and
networks are major energy consumers, and they are natural places to focus for companies
that wish to lower their energy footprints as part of their environmental
sustainability initiatives.
This is why a
major US insurance company opted to spend millions of dollars several years ago
to build a new, green data center, and why a major state government thousands
of miles away did the same. In both cases, the data center capital outlays were
extreme. And in both cases, the organizations projected that they would realize
substantial cost and energy savings over time that would enable them to recoup
their upfront costs.
Today, nearly
every organization talks about sustainability, and IT consultancies like Accenture comment that:
“The
[COVID-19] pandemic has increased pressure on leadership teams to deliver
financial value with societal and environmental impact for the benefit of all
stakeholders … But the responsible values and the environmental, social, and
governance (ESG) intentions of leadership teams are outrunning the ability of
their organizations to deliver the necessary behavioral change.
“To succeed, they
must strengthen their ‘Sustainability DNA,’ the management practices, systems
and processes that shape new behaviors and decision-making capabilities.”
So, if
organizations are all talking about environmental sustainability, what prevents
them from delivering sustainability results, specifically in IT? Here are two
big reasons:
1. Sustainability
ROI is hard to quantify.
It was easy to
justify computer and storage virtualization as a cost- and energy-saving
strategy because the corporate C-level could see physical servers and storage
devices being moved out of data centers, and it wasn’t hard to visualize the
energy savings that were possible because of these removals. But it is far more
difficult to justify an investment in a new HVAC system that will improve data
center cooling near “hot centers” like server farms, where energy savings are
tougher to quantify, and where all management sees is a new capital investment
in facility equipment.
2. Sustainability
usually doesn’t directly map to profits and new IT project deployment.
When an IT
sustainability initiative goes up against a business profitability or major IT
project, CIOs confirm that the sustainability goal won’t win out. Most of the
CIOs I have visited with tell me that the initiatives that they’re queuing up
for 2022 are a continuation of digitalization, the introduction of more
business process and IT automation, projects designed to improve the customer
and online experiences, security, and backend work with their ERP and supply
chain systems. No one has talked about sustainability being a top IT priority
in 2022.
How Sustainability
Is Gaining Traction
Sustainability is
gaining traction because it is being pushed by governmental agencies with their
enormous purchasing powers. In 2020, the US federal government spent $682
billion on contracts with private firms. The government will use that buying
power to further sustainability by targeting a 50% to 52% reduction in carbon
emissions by 2030.
“From this
point forward, companies will be judged by more than the profits they generate;
they will be measured by the value they create for society. By virtue of the
federal marketplace, the government has an opportunity to incentivize its
contractors to heed that mandate,” according to a recent Washington Technology article.
The drive for
corporate accountability doesn’t stop there, because as larger enterprises work
on sustainability to meet the government’s contractual stipulations, they’re
also pressuring their smaller suppliers to show evidence of sustainability
progress.
Enterprises
like Kellogg, Nestle, and Walmart all place pressures on smaller company
suppliers to adopt sustainability practices to the point where third-party
auditors certify these companies’ sustainability progress as a precondition for
doing business with their larger enterprise customers. As companies scramble to
meet sustainability requirements, they look to the data center as an obvious
area where they can show immediate results.
Greening the Data
Center
Although CIOs don’t have sustainability penciled into their top priorities, they haven’t been ignoring it, either.
IT has been
virtualizing computers and networks, improving equipment configurations on the
data center floor, introducing better cooling systems, reducing data center
building footprints, eliminating aging IT assets by recycling them and
digitalizing paper to reduce physical storage. More employees are now working
remotely, thanks to digital collaboration and conferencing. This has reduced
facility square footage and its corresponding energy consumption. While CIOs
have been shrinking their physical data center footprints, they have been
moving more IT off-premises to the cloud. Some of this might come down to just
punting the energy football to cloud providers — but from the CIO’s direct
energy consumption accountability to the company, it looks good.
This brings us
full circle to the initial question: Should CIOs make sustainability an IT
priority?
Based on current CIO top goals, the answer is “no,”
but a combination of vendor- and cloud-based technologies is making it easier
for IT to advance sustainability.
It is now a
question as to whether most corporate IT decision-makers will feel strongly
enough about sustainability to make it a stated IT goal in future plans.
Related
Content:
9
Ways to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Data
How
CIOs Can Advance Company Sustainability Goals
Is Cloud Migration a Path to Carbon Footprint
Reduction?
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