Four ways data can help your organisation achieve net zero

Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its Sixth Assessment Report with a warning to not exceed their 1.5C benchmark. To achieve this, we need to stabilise our climate by building a net zero carbon economy. It’s crucial to identify opportunities to replace your tools, systems, and activities with more efficient options. By using cloud solutions, you can cut energy consumption and costs while reducing the physical footprint of your datacenters. Many see digitalisation as an important way to help organisations adapt and grow in this market.

At the same time, 62 percent of organisations say rising energy bills are a driving factor behind increasing costs. The cloud is one of the key resources capable of helping organisations achieve greater efficiency and enabling technological advances, all while reducing costs. It will also help organisations meet their own sustainability goals

Two years ago, Microsoft pledged to become carbon negative, water positive and achieve zero waste by 2030. And on our journey, we found that delivering these goals alongside reducing our energy consumption is not easy: it calls for wholesale business modernisation. Organisations must understand the implications of operating models across all business functions, achieving full value-chain visibility and consumer transparency.

However, this is complicated by a lack of common and accurate methodology for measuring energy usage and sustainability progress. In fact, according to our study, 59 percent of UK firms will miss the Government’s 2050 net zero target unless they take urgent action on carbon reduction.

Data can help you reduce your resource usage, record your environmental footprint, and report to stakeholders. This not only will reduce your energy costs but help your progress on your path to net zero.

Here are four ways you can use data to help reduce energy costs:

1. Streamline data integration, calculations, and reporting

Your value chain accounts for up to 90 percent of an organisation’s resource footprint. Improve visibility by using a common data model. When you unify your data, you can track energy usage across your entire operation and gain actionable insights—including enterprise resource planning (ERP) data, plant data, IoT sensor data, telemetry at the edge.

2. Analyse, visualise and report

Improve emissions recording and boost reporting to better track energy consumption and emissions. This will allow you to assess and accelerate progress towards goals with emissions and operational dashboards. By leveraging a common data model, you can easily build reports for regulators, stakeholders and more. Automation can also reduce reliance on manual processes and record, report, and reduce emissions more efficiently.

3. Scale and grow with the cloud

Access cloud-based technology that allows extensions that will help your organisation expand front-end functionalities and build robust back-end solutions. You can also collaborate or partner with other organisations to leverage ready-made technology such as AI, digital twins and more to drive sustainable innovation.

4. Reduce costs and energy use with digitalisation

By moving to the cloud, you will reduce energy use and costs as you’ll only use what you need, when you need it. For example, Azure’s cloud services can reduce energy use by up to 93 percent and carbon emissions by up to 98 percent compared to traditional on-premises servers, according to an updated study published in 2020 by Microsoft and WSP.

Organisations need to prioritise the reduction of energy costs and accelerating their path to net zero requires focussed and urgent action. On 1 June, we announced the availability of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, which helps you leverage your data and move toward more cost efficient, sustainable and innovative operations.

Visit Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to find out more.