Sustainability is not an optional extra

The EU has already published its Green Deal action plan, which calls for data centers and telecommunications networks to be climate-neutral by 2030. For CIOs, this means the IT energy footprint needs to be recorded and reduced. This applies to both in-house data centers and cloud services, which are handling heavier and heavier workloads.

Improving energy efficiency in data centers

Aging data centers present a major challenge: in addition to their actual operation, they consume a further 80 percent of their energy per kilowatt of power for cooling and data center operation. Valuable resources, such as waste heat, often go unused. However, it is practically impossible to optimize old infrastructure during ongoing operations. Given the drastic steps required, it would be like engaging in open-heart surgery. In addition, the effort is hard to justify from a cost perspective.

That’s why companies are choosing modern, sustainable data centers from providers such as Green for upgrade projects. These are holistically optimized and take into account all aspects of sustainability:

• They systematically measure and improve energy efficiency at hundreds of operating data points.
   
• They contribute to decarbonization by sourcing renewable energy and also producing green energy themselves through photovoltaic installations.
   
• They use resources carefully by making waste heat from data centers available for heating purposes for thousands of households via district heating networks. This saves around 20,000 tons of CO2 per year.  

The green cloud

Hyperscalers and local cloud providers recognize their responsibility and look for sustainable data centers when choosing their data center provider. In this way, they can make a significant contribution to achieving the climate targets set. But it pays to ask: when choosing future cloud providers, companies should add energy efficiency, decarbonization, resource management and other sustainability criteria to their list of requirements. 

By outsourcing their IT infrastructure to external, highly optimized data centers and the cloud, companies are creating a future-oriented IT infrastructure that enables sustainable digitalization with the right choice of providers.

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