Companies are increasingly placing a bigger emphasis on sustainable activities across their business domains. Recently, the term ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance, has gained significant traction. ESG serves as a comprehensive framework for assessing a company’s business practices and performance in relation to sustainability and ethical issues. Additionally, it provides a way to measure business risks and identify opportunities.
While sustainability, ethics, and governance are generally considered non-financial performance indicators, the role of an ESG program is to ensure accountability and implementation of systems and processes to manage a company’s impacts, such as its CO₂ footprint and the way it treats employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
The challenge of accurate figures
To establish a trustworthy ESG initiative, businesses must acquire accurate and reliable data from different fields. This challenge is particularly evident in the realm of IT, as illustrated by the following example:
Organizations that maintain their own data centers have the capability of accurately reporting the energy usage of these facilities. By leveraging their personal power circuits and electrical meters, this reporting can be done with great accuracy. However, determining the power consumption of workstation computers, monitors, and printers becomes more challenging, especially when they are located in home offices rather than the company’s own buildings. As a result, estimating the energy consumption of workstation computers is the common practice. Unfortunately, many companies simply take the maximum electricity consumption or published average values for their calculations, leading to highly inaccurate results.
While this inaccurate data is sufficient in providing an overview of the situation, the goal of ESG programs, however, is to drive improvement while considering the cost/benefit. For example, simply replacing an old desktop PC with a modern mini-PC is not necessarily a more sustainable solution. It’s important to account for the CO₂ footprint associated with manufacturing new computers. The key instead is to understand whether users can achieve the same user experience with their existing PCs as with a new one, or if a small upgrade will help enhance efficiency and sustainability.
Observability brings the necessary insights
And this is where Observability helps. Observability represents the next stage in the evolution of IT monitoring and is being implemented in various aspects of IT. The information obtained from this source may find be leveraged in ESG initiatives, especially to make more precise assessments and to better evaluate the cost/benefit question.
This application extends beyond the workplace, where it can help determine how user-friendly and efficient older computers are and whether they should be upgraded or replaced when necessary. It can also identify which applications generate particularly high levels of network traffic, which in turn lead to a corresponding CO₂ impact from the data centers across data networks. With Observability data, it becomes possible to assess, plan, and execute data center consolidations or cloud migration with regards to ESG goals.
Using IT data for the ESG perspective
IT departments, alongside Observability solution providers like Riverbed, can make valuable contributions to various ESG initiatives. The data gathered in IT can be harnessed and used for sustainability projects to achieve measurable successes that are also cost-beneficial. It is important to tailor the parameters used in the calculations to the specific situation of each company, considering variables such as the CO2eq/kWh value and energy costs differ from country to country and company to company.
Before starting large ESG projects, IT departments can achieve success with small “quick wins.” It is easy to analyze whether a server in the data center is still operational but no longer in use. Another starting point is to determine whether users are shutting down their computers at the end of the work day or putting them in sleep mode. If not, a simple change to the settings can ensure that the computer is automatically sent to “sleep” after a few minutes of idle time. However, since sustainability is also about fostering awareness, it can be equally effective to make users aware of specific situations automatically to educate them about the impact on the environment.
The data from IT’s observability tools brings more context to sustainability projects, and thereby leads to the discovery of quick wins and opportunities for improvement.