HFS Highlight: Google aligns sustainability and cloud benefits

Sustainability, in all its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) forms, is increasingly driving business and IT decision-making—and businesses are setting themselves various targets at varying levels of ambition. Enterprise customers are starting to prioritize sustainability in their technology projects and services contracts—but decisions must still be made within cost, data regulation, and performance constraints. Climate change is a massive data problem—so it makes sense that technology is part of the solution—as are the data, people, and providers that underpin businesses’ operations. This Highlight report examines Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as one example—among many others we’ve covered—that’s combining its technology and services to drive sustainability internally and for its customers. The ecosystem of sustainability services and technology providers—that includes GCP’s cloud competition and service provider partners—will be beyond vital in making sustainability native to every business, everywhere, and achieving real sustainable change.

We need scalable sustainability solutions that meet the scale of the climate crisis

Despite a growing ecosystem, comparatively few off-the-shelf technology or service provider solutions exist for sustainability. For example, in calculating the climate risk for financial investment decisions, analytics and machine learning (ML) models still need to be highly tailored. GCP’s operations and innovation work with implementation partners and enterprise leaders is a massive opportunity to build blueprints that align sustainability with improving IT and business process—that can then be replicated throughout industries that all need to make sustainable transitions.

Customers are increasingly expecting providers to bring sustainability to the table in contract and project discussions—but decisions are still made within cost, data regulation, and performance constraints

While the carbon footprint of cloud projects is being prioritized more and more over cost by customers in contracts and early project discussions, a variety of opportunities and constraints determine just what options are available when it comes to choosing the most sustainable datacenter location:

• Data residency requirements (GDPR in Europe, for example): can data be stored in one place or several locations—and where?
• Performance: what’s the acceptable or desired latency for applications and their end-users?
• Financial: how much can sustainable IT bring down costs and boost a company’s green credentials? How does this manifest in a company’s carbon footprint reporting structures and link to tax? A potential check for the CFO’s box.
• Environmental targets: for both Google and its clients, green IT projects put a check in the corporate marketing and sustainability teams’ boxes.

Within these opportunities and constraints, often customers can boil a decision down to hosting their data and operations in a region (for example, Europe or the US)—but within that region, there’s flexibility. GCP can then help shift data and operations to the lowest-carbon cloud locations within these geographic and performance constraints.

With sustainability often being a high-level corporate conversation, as well as an operational challenge, GCP has developed a roadmap to meet execs’ sustainability demands of projects. Starting by benchmarking customers’ existing operations using GCP and third-party data, the opportunity to reduce emissions through cloud and other tools becomes clearer. GCP also has a model to estimate the CO₂ impact of cloud migration decisions that teams can work through (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: Google Cloud’s customer roadmap for IT sustainability

Source: Google Cloud, 2021

Google Cloud’s customer cases are the platform to replicating sustainability and cloud benefits throughout any industry

The opportunity for GCP and the whole ecosystem is that the core principles of the use cases below are widely applicable to any industry. The need to make IT and business operations more sustainable is a universal must; cloud and combined emerging technologies have the potential to improve operations and accelerate innovation around sustainability goals.

The sustainability of operations can be improved through more informed migration, architecture, and general cloud decisions to reduce the environmental impact of IT operations; for example, this might involve running operations on datacenters powered by high levels of renewable energy, underpinned by “load optimization” (running non-critical operations when renewable energy is plentiful). On the innovation front, computing power and the availability of data can feed ML and analytics models to discover new solutions and improve decision making. Exhibit 2 outlines Google’s view of the adoption curve that most customers follow as they explore cloud solutions to reduce their carbon footprints.

Exhibit 2: Google’s view of the customer adoption curve for sustainability-improving cloud solutions.

Source: Google Cloud, 2021

Some of GCP’s enterprise examples include:

• PayPal digital payment infrastructure: GCP is helping it meet public commitments to reduce the environmental impact of its operations, as detailed above.
• SunPower wanted to reimagine the business model of the solar power industry. Putting solar panels on roofs is data-intensive: trees block sunlight, regulations are specific to locations, firefighters need access to roofs, and much more. Now, SunPower can take images from Google Maps of rooftops and through ML models create potential designs in minutes, versus hours-long one-on-one bespoke engagements.
• National Geographic’s image library was moved from on-prem to GCP. The emissions saved for a relatively small 20TB application was approximately 17000 kg of CO2 per year. For context, that “small” project is worth the equivalent to the CO2 absorption capacity of 20 acres of rainforest, or the emissions from burning 19000 lbs. of coal.
• Improvements to operational efficiency in GCP’s datacenters through AI and other models can be applied to any building and any operation in different industries—for example, optimizing Building Management Systems (BMS) or factories’ process control networks.

The Bottom Line: Google Cloud is one giant in a growing ecosystem of sustainability services and technology providers that must make sustainability native internally and for customers. Understanding both the constraints and benefits of improving the sustainability of IT and business operations is one step towards replicating what we’ve discussed here throughout enterprises in all industries.