How cloud computing helps in meeting sustainability and ESG goals

Executives are always pressured by stakeholders to meet business objectives. In recent times, more so arising from environmental awareness, stakeholders are not only interested in meeting the business objectives, they are demanding that this is achieved within the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mindset. A recent report by KPMG found that investors’ and customers’ scrutiny of a business’s ESG performance has increased with fifty-eight per cent of executives seeing increased demands for increased transparency on ESG issues.

Investors are relying on ESG strategies to ensure they put their money in ventures that have a lower risk. Consumers are willing to pay premium prices for sustainable products. Decisions to buy are now being made with social issues in mind. All this means that business needs to focus on quality and cost but also aim at establishing sustainable, socially responsible, and environmentally conscious practices to win and retain customers as well as attract investors. 

ESG is a fast emerging concept denoting the evaluation of a business’s collective conscientiousness for environmental, social, and governance factors. The environmental component evaluates how a business performs as a custodian of nature, analysing how its operating activities affect the environment. The social component looks into the strengths and weaknesses in the management of relationships with various stakeholders, while the governance element evaluates business leadership, examining how decisions are made in relation to safeguarding the rights of each stakeholder.

Cloud computing

With the increased environmental, social, and governance awareness and heightened pressure to put sustainability issues in the spotlight, business leaders are looking for ways through which they can achieve their core objectives within the required parameters. With the amount of data that is needed to achieve this, cloud computing has been hailed as the panacea that will help a business meet their needs while reducing their ecological footprint. Cloud computing not only gives the agility and speed to make decisions and accelerate digital transformation but also helps in reaching sustainability goals. We suggest three ways through which businesses can use cloud computing to meet the ESG goals.

Use of green equipment in data centres

There had been concerns that cloud computing and the whole data centre space would lead to increased consumption of power. However, with the creation of efficient technologies, businesses have kept their power bills relatively low.

Investment in green equipment and technologies such as liquid immersion cooling has allowed the business to increase digitisation with cloud computing being at the centre of the transformation.

Recycling and reuse 

Traditional technology heavily relied on equipment that use a large amount of power. While the massive technology change requires a shift to new equipment, businesses have found ways to give life to old equipment. This not only helps the business to reduce capital expenditure but also reduces the waste that finds its way to the landfills. This in essence aligns a business budget and equipment to ESG goals.

Green data centres

One way to ensure sustainable data is an investment in green data centres; this requires a business to adopt renewable energy as means to power the crucial infrastructure.

With the above and more initiatives, a business can achieve its ESG goals more easily. 

For more information about sustainable cloud infrastructure as a service and/or liquid immersion cooling contact us at info@peasoup.cloud or phone +44 (0)808 9000 247.