Your guide to sustainability with cloud solutions.

Solutions for the industry that are implemented new, benefit from a set of principles that provide prescriptive guidance to improving the quality of their deployments.  When the industry moves from digital adoption to digital transformation to digital acceleration, the sustainability journey requires a strong digital foundation. It is the best preparation for keeping pace with this rapid change.

This is true for meeting new sustainability requirements, avoiding the worst impacts of climate change and other business priorities such as driving growth, adapting to industry shifts, and navigating energy consumption and economic conditions. It helps to track and manage data at scale, unifying data and improving visibility across the organization.

As an aside, the well-architected framework consists of five pillars. These are reliability (REL), security (SEC), cost optimization (COST), operational excellence (OPS) and performance efficiency (PERF). The elements that support these pillars are a review, a cost and optimization advisor, documentation, patterns-support-and-service offers, reference architectures and design principles.

Sustainability is a journey. Cloud solutions can be developed by fostering growth and controlling costs while contributing to sustainability goals. The journey can be shaped by building resilience with an ESG strategy, resizing opportunities to control costs, improving efficiency with energy reduction, and tracking progress for environmental impact.

The well-architected framework helps to reliably report your sustainability impact, driving meaningful progress and finding gaps where the most impact can be delivered but a leader’s insights and perspectives can tune the sustainability investments to create opportunities that align with other goals. While some of the industry-tested learnings are brought in this article, meeting sustainability goals is a big win for an organization of any size. That is why a tiny country like Bhutan can claim to be a leader with its carbon negative footprint. Companies that meet sustainability goals are favored by investors, consumer satisfaction and employee retention are also improved with clear indicators such as customers willing to pay more for options with sustainability. Knowing where we are today, setting future goals and making data driven decisions to create steps towards realizing those dreams are invaluable exercises for your blue ocean strategy.

Eventually, there will be regulations mandating similar work but a determination of the ESG metrics provides competitive differentiation for your solutions. Granted there might be a cultural shift involved not different from the one experienced in adopting the cloud, but the potential for dramatic discoveries and strong storytelling can unite the people behind the vision.  Some tools help such as the Microsoft Sustainability Manager can be instrumental towards realizing this vision as it unifies the data to monitor and manage the environmental impact.

An ideal tool and central vantage point can assess the value of corporate sustainability. But an even more important consideration is that the scope for similar assessment and impact can be delegated to different organizational units and departments and assist with incremental progress towards the sustainability journey when those participants learn to self-evaluate their path and metrics.

Sustainability is also about consumption, efficiency and digitizing the supply chain.  Transparency and tighter upstream and downstream collaboration are needed if cyclical efficiencies are to be discovered in products and processes. A single unified platform can help with visualizing the data from disparate devices and systems. Adopting recyclable and repairable software goes a great way towards sustainability just as much as devices.  A strong digital foundation can drive both sustainability and transformational goals. The urgency, scope and scale of the task cited in this article can help you with the journey from pledges to progress.

References: IaC Shortcomings and resolutions.