A focused approach on cloud migration can reduce global CO2 emissions by 59 million tons, drive greater circularity and result in more sustainable products & services, said professional services firm Accenture in a new report.

Sustainable cloud positions companies to deliver on new commitments: carbon reduction and responsible innovation. Companies have historically driven financial, security, and agility benefits through cloud, but sustainability is becoming an imperative.

•    Forty-four per cent of CEOs in the United Nations Global Compact - Accenture Strategy CEO Study on Sustainability see a net-zero future for their company in the next ten years.

•    Between 2013-2019, companies with consistently high environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance enjoyed 4.7x higher operating margins and lower volatility than low ESG performers over the same period.

•    Migrations to public cloud result in up to 30-40% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings.

Drivers like greater workload flexibility, better server utilization rates, and more energy-efficient infrastructure all make public clouds more cost efficient than enterprise-owned data centres.

As importantly, cloud migrations also unlock new opportunities like clean energy transitions enabled by cloud-based geographic analyses, material waste reductions from better data insights, and targeted medical R&D as a result of faster analytics platforms.

Migrating toward a greener cloud

Not all cloud migration approaches are created equal. Sustainability benefits will vary based on these three things:

1. Select with purpose

The first step towards a sustainable cloud journey begins with selecting a carbon-thoughtful provider. Cloud operators set different corporate commitments towards sustainability, which in turn determine how they plan, build, power, operate, and retire their data centres.

2. Build with ambition

The journey toward a sustainable cloud involves three ambition levels:

•    Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) migrations without major redesign. Companies with average on-premise to cloud migrations can drive 65% energy reduction and carbon emission reduction of 84%.

•    Sustainable software engineering practices. Companies can reduce application energy consumption by up to 50x when selecting the appropriate programming language for the task.

•    Application optimization for fabric of the cloud. Companies can stretch carbon emission reductions to 98% by configuring applications for the cloud.


3. Innovate further

Companies can unlock greater financial, societal and environmental benefits through cloud-based circular operations and sustainable products and services.

The greenest cloud

Companies beginning their cloud journey confront a number of questions. The decisions they make will directly determine how sustainable their solutions are and the benefits they drive. Those that choose wisely will gain unprecedented levels of innovation leading to both a greener planet and a greener balance sheet.