At Inspire 2021, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. The service (currently in preview) is designed to help companies measure, understand, report and reduce environmental impact and therefore be able to measure progress towards sustainability goals.
As discussed in our recent blog on cloud computing and sustainability, the cloud and digital transformation is the route for both economic and green success. The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is the most recent release in the industry-specific cloud offerings from Microsoft and another step in Microsoft’s sustainable future plan.*
CEOs world over know that urgent action is required to reduce carbon emissions (see Accenture infographic), but to do so effectively we need to work together to understand and mitigate environmental impact. What we cannot track and report, cannot be standardly managed. This new service will allow companies to first understand their emissions and second, use the data to create plans that can be actioned upon.
Example of Use
An example of use would be simplifying carbon accounting. Take the data of the emissions of your supply chain, value chain and enterprise systems, connect the streams and turn the data into metric tons of carbon. This is then recorded, reported and now allows the company to take action to reduce.
The cloud for sustainability is a base with multiple SaaS offerings which can connect to real-time data. There are sure to be many custom solutions built on top of this framework meaning with time, this should be a robust and comprehensive tool.
Find out More
You can find out more about the cloud for sustainability in the release blog or look out for other sustainability services and updates on a general release on the Microsoft Sustainability page.
*Microsoft has committed to being carbon negative by 2030 and is actually on track with work done over the last year. Achieved by both making changes and actively removing emissions.
