With each passing year, sustainability and what it means to businesses continue to evolve. What initially started as a fringe movement for some companies has now become a critical business imperative.
As global issues such as the climate crisis pose major challenges to the overall landscape, organisations across the globe are making radical changes and are re-evaluating their business strategies. With sustainability being the need of the hour, governments and private entities are boosting their investments in initiatives that create positive social and environmental impacts. In fact, CEOs place environmental sustainability in their top 10 strategic business priorities, according to global analyst firm Gartner.
Beyond reducing their environmental impact, embracing sustainability opens a host of opportunities for businesses to remain relevant and competitive. Its implementation in long-term business plans and strategies presents a positive effect on customer loyalty and revenue. Other advantages include increased employee retention and improved brand image from customers, employees, and investors.
Sustainability is a marathon and not a sprint. The road to success requires cooperation between governments and private enterprises. It requires vision and leadership, and engagement from various stakeholders. Within enterprises, building a sustainable business entails fostering a culture that takes into account responsible practices across all branches of the organisation.
“Making meaningful progress to address climate change takes unprecedented action across all industries and societies. Governments and tech companies both need to put in considerable work to support sustainability-minded initiatives and startups. We recognise this and acknowledge that the ways we do business have impacts far beyond our own company,” says Paul Misener, VP, Global Innovation Policy and Communications at Amazon.
“Amazon is financing sustainability projects that fall under five categories: renewable energy, clean transportation, sustainable buildings, affordable housing and socio-economic advancement and empowerment. This would not have been possible without the continued support of the public sector.”
Putting sustainability at the core of business strategy positions businesses on a new path to innovation and expanded capabilities. Hence, a growing number of companies are deploying technologies to manage and support their sustainability agendas.
Technology: a key enabler
Many business leaders understand the transformative potential of the cloud when it comes to flexibility, agility, and scalability, but many tend to overlook the environmental impact of moving to the cloud.
The cloud plays an essential role in helping organisations become more sustainable. The sustainability business case for the cloud is quite simple: it reduces the on-premises footprint associated with reduced power and cooling, hardware, and increased computing power. It enables businesses to adopt a sustainable approach by reducing their carbon footprint and associated costs while fostering the research and innovation that can help propel them to a digital future.
Shifting to the cloud can enable businesses reduce carbon emissions, which contributes significantly to environmental sustainability. The adoption of cloud computing can prevent the emission of more than 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2021 through 2024, according to market intelligence firm IDC.
Additionally, Accenture also revealed that migration to the public cloud can achieve significant carbon reduction in the form of a 5.9 percent decrease in total IT emissions or nearly 60 million tons of CO2 globally per year.
Global hyperscalers are actively taking significant steps to decarbonise their data centres. In line with this, Amazon Web Services (AWS) built an infrastructure that is designed to operate efficiently at scale. This results in efficiency advantages at both the server and facility levels in the cloud infrastructure, which enables both AWS and their customers dramatically reduce the energy used to run workloads. 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, found that moving workloads to AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprint by 88 percent when considering the carbon intensity of consumed electricity and renewable energy purchases, reducing associated carbon emissions.
The cloud giant also made facility-level improvements in efficiency including re-designing its data centres to use lower energy methods and a leaner electrical infrastructure, resulting in lower energy losses to power distribution. With the launch of the new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, customers in the country can move their workloads from enterprise data centres to AWS, and benefit from lower energy consumption and reduced carbon footprint.
“Our new customer carbon footprint tool uses simple visualisations to show customers their historical carbon emissions, estimate emissions avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data centre, and review forecasted emissions based on their current use,” explains Misener.
He adds, “The forecast shows how customers’ footprints will change as Amazon stays on path to powering its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025, five years earlier than the original target of 2030, and drives toward net-zero carbon by 2040.”
Amazon has over 310 renewable energy projects across the globe, with over 15.7 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy capacity, and once fully operational, it will prevent emission of over 17.3 million tons of CO2 a year. In the UAE, Amazon recently launched an on-site solar project to provide nearly 2.3 megawatts (MW) in renewable energy to Amazon facilities, the equivalent of powering 200 homes in the country.
“AWS is committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet. In 2019, we co-founded The Climate Pledge – a commitment to be net zero carbon across our business by 2040 – ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. As part of this pledge, AWS is on a path to power our operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025,” says Misener.
“We also applaud the government of the UAE’s commitment to sustainability. The UAE Vision 2021 has put sustainability as a key part of the National Agenda and a country priority in the coming years.”
As digitalisation continues to proliferate, the innovation behind the cloud will continue to play a pivotal role in enabling sustainability. For UAE business and IT leaders that are working towards improving sustainability, the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region puts them in an ideal position to take a strong step in taking this directive forward.
Find out more about how AWS accelerating sustainability goals here.
