In corporate Australia, sustainability is no longer a side show. It’s the main event.
Gone are the days when enterprises could get away with ‘tick-box’ sustainability. A donation to an environmental charity here, a tree-planting team building exercise there, and a few platitudes in a corporate social responsibility brochure (rarely read internally, let alone in the real world) simply does not cut it anymore.
For myriad reasons, consumers today are more connected, more educated, and more invested in the social conscience of the brands they choose to engage with.
As a result, the topics of sustainability and responding to climate change are now where they belong, at the front-and-centre of board level discussions.
Sustainability strategies have been elevated from footnotes in unread PDFs, to the opening chapters of corporate Australia’s most important publications: annual reports.
For example, in its latest annual report, Woolworths dedicated the lion’s share of the first six pages to sustainability initiatives – from the plastic removed from its operations or recycled in store, to emissions reductions, and animal welfare.
ANZ and NAB, two of Australia’s big four banks, similarly gave their sustainability strategies prominent placement. Even major energy companies, such as BHP, are calling out sustainability as their most important value. These are just a few examples, but a close reading of the annual reports from the rest of the ASX 100 paints a similar picture.
While a number of initiatives are highlighted in the reports depending on the industry in which each enterprise operates, one particular challenge is universal among them – climate change and the need to reduce emissions.
Energy-hungry IT infrastructure
While the need to reduce emissions has never been greater, the need for energy has never been higher.
Every business today is a digital business. Between the emergence of remote work, the explosion of ecommerce, and the entrance of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning into even the most traditional industries, the amount of data enterprises generate today is truly staggering.
It is in the data centre, including those used for private and public clouds, that all this information is generated, stored, and analysed. All the computing power needed to do this requires huge amounts of energy, dwarfed only by the amount of energy required to prevent all the necessary infrastructure from overheating.
This insatiable need for energy is compounded in traditional data centres that are notorious for their inefficiency. Without getting too technical, the legacy approach to data centres is to have at least two of everything – servers, storage, networking, etc – in case something fails. Deploying applications on old technology is not only inefficient but lacks the ability to modernise and automate which all companies are asking for today.
And it gets worse.
Most servers are massively underutilised, often running below half their actual capacity to leave a buffer for additional resources in response to spikes in demand.
So not only is there double of everything, the duplicates run at an even lower fraction of their actual capacity.
Don’t take my word for it, in its business guidance the Australian government’s Department of Industry, Science, Energy, and Resources highlights “low server use remains one of the largest opportunities for energy savings in data centres”.
So as Australian businesses look to make a real impact on their emissions, it’s no surprise that transforming their IT infrastructure is often their first port of call.
IT evolution driving down emissions
Keeping in mind the critical need to run digital infrastructure (you can’t just take your business offline), there are two key strategies Australian enterprises are pursuing to cut their emissions while improving performance – transforming their own infrastructure and/or taking advantage of cloud.h
An exemplar of the “DIY” approach is Victoria’s Nature’s Organics.
The manufacturer of popular brands Earth’s Choice and Australian Pure implemented Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure – which collapses duplicate infrastructure needs and runs even the largest workloads with less physical equipment through server virtualisation – and it is powered by its own 1299KW roof-mounted solar deployment on its manufacturing plant.
Through transforming its legacy data centre, it reduced IT-related energy consumption by approximately 55 per cent as a result.
In fact, recent research from analyst firm, Atlantic Ventures, found an enterprise with 11,000 employees could slash its energy consumption and carbon footprint by transitioning from a traditional three-tier data centre to hyperconverged infrastructure.
But for many enterprises, taking advantage of the economies of scale provided by cloud, which can include hyperscale cloud providers AWS, Google, and Microsoft, offers many of the same benefits when trying to reduce corporate carbon footprint.
All three of these leaders have invested heavily into powering their data centres sustainably. For example, Amazon aims to power 100 per cent of its data centres with renewable energy by 2025 and is building utility-scale solar and wind projects to get there. Microsoft not only aims to be “carbon negative” by 2030, it also plans to eliminate its entire historical carbon footprint by 2050.
Whether transforming their own IT backbone, taking advantage of public cloud, or some combination of these two approaches, IT infrastructure is being elevated to the same board-level discussions as sustainability. They’re two sides of the same coin.
Both were once undercards, but they’re now headliners in their own right. Whether those headlines are positive or negative will have a profound impact on the business.
