Moving to the Cloud for Environmental Reasons

 Moving to the Cloud for Environmental Reasons

The cloud in this context is our Internet.  Which takes a vast amount of power to keep going.  Whether you have physical hardware depreciating in a room somewhere, or only some of your technical estate in the cloud so far, moving to cloud operations may be one way to scale your business and lower your impacts.

One of the advantages Lightrise have benefitted from in our growth is the trickle down impacts through our supply chain.  There is no one bigger vendor for us than Microsoft themselves who commit to the following goals

Carbon Negative: By 2030, Microsoft aim to be carbon negative, and by 2050, remove all historical emissions since their founding in 1975.

Water Positive: By 2030, Microsoft will replenish more water than they consume across their direct operations.

Zero Waste: By 2030, Microsoft will achieve zero waste across our direct waste footprint.

Ecosystem Preservation: Microsoft will protect more land than they use by 2025 and build a Planetary Computer.

Additionally, Microsoft invest in renewable energy, promote sustainability in our supply chain, and reduce their product carbon footprint. Their goal is to accelerate global progress toward a sustainable future. 🌍♻️

Being a vigilant, environmental scientist at Uni (and by heart), from the science I determined what trajectory we were on course for as a global civilization pretty early, and it's scary what can happen.  We are still living through the emissions from around 30 years ago, due the latency of effects.  The strong hurricane and typhoon seasons, the famines, drought and decay of today will be much worse in 30 years time. The only real way to create atmospheric change, and set the scene for terraforming new planets for humanity's universal expansion is to take negative climate gases out of the Earth's atmosphere at scale.  So it was great to see Microsoft moving towards this goal earlier this week with a company that specialises in carbon removal and sequestration 1Point5. 

On a business level moving to Microsoft Cloud enables you to benefit from Microsoft's environmental credentials,  but also make the most of easy access environmental reporting to drive your organisations environmental impact goals forward.   Information we've used in our ongoing B-Corp application preparation.

Copilot and machine learning are going to be part of the solution, and to a smaller extent the problem also.  They will use a lot of energy, but when constructed is against these design principals and objectives the future looks brighter. 

About the writer:

Gareth Jones is CEO and Founder of Lightrise Consulting (www.lightriseconsulting.com) a specialist Microsoft Partner providing business answers and solutions to improve ESG and people experiences.