Globally, sustainability has quickly risen the ranks in recent years to emerge as a primary business consideration. Particularly for the Asia Pacific (Apac) region, this shift is urgent and necessary considering the far-reaching consequences of climate inaction on one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Extreme climate change is estimated to potentially cost Asia 37% of its collective Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
With that, the push for organisations to improve and report on sustainability is picking up pace in the region. For instance, Singapore launched ESGenome last year, an effort to build a common disclosure tool that will make it easier for listed companies to report on their sustainability. Other countries across the region are mirroring similar commitments to moving the needle on accurate sustainability reporting. The International Data Corp (IDC) predicts half of all A-2000 companies will be able to meaningfully track and report on their carbon footprint by 2025.
As businesses step up their sustainability strategies, reducing emissions and waste from their own technology operations will be key. Cloud computing, specifically, will be critical to these efforts, particularly as burgeoning demand for digital services is expected to place Southeast Asia at the epicentre of data centre growth globally, with a predicted 18.97% CAGR through to 2027. Yet, even as businesses transition on-premises workloads to the cloud to maximise energy efficiencies, the fact remains that data centres have a ravenous appetite for energy. This presents a growing area of opportunity for businesses to adopt a more sustainable cloud position.
Ultimately, reducing IT component waste, optimising data centre energy consumption and innovating have strong potential to come together in bridging sustainability and cloud efficiency, and cloud providers have a responsibility to help achieve this. Cloud players must rethink how they design and innovate in technology to minimise environmental impact, drive performance, and support the wider ecosystem.
First things first: Cooling servers efficiently
From proprietary water-cooling to the latest hybrid immersion liquid cooling technology, cloud providers are constantly innovating to find energy-efficient ways to cool servers and reduce environmental impact. This is for good reason: Cooling servers contribute to the majority of overall data centre energy consumption.
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Take immersion cooling, for instance, which is the practice of submerging electronic devices in a thermally and not electrically conductive liquid. A cloud provider can eliminate the need to employ pumps, heat sink structures, heat exchanges and the large surface areas that limit the number of servers that can be implemented. Instead, the cooling effect from the fluid could penetrate more thoroughly, enabling cloud providers to maintain the full infrastructure needed for cloud servers, while reducing energy consumption.
In the same vein, hybrid immersion liquid cooling is another unique technology that has emerged for sustainability-minded cloud providers in recent times, building on the best of both water cooling and immersion cooling. In this model, servers can be submerged in a dielectric fluid in their own independent tank, with high-heating components continuing to benefit from direct-to-chip water cooling.
Crucially, the hybrid immersion cooling approach (as one of the latest solutions in the market) allows for a variety of benefits. It can be designed to allow for more compute power while preserving footprint and adapting to harsh climates. Most notably, a well-designed hybrid immersion liquid cooling technology solution can eliminate pumps and fans for zero rack cooling power consumption, and a silent data centre.
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Embedding sustainability across the supply chain
Applying circular economy principles to supply chains can also open opportunities to provide more energy-efficient solutions. While many businesses already do this with their own supply chains, they can further benefit from engaging cloud providers who work and design with the same mindset. Key factors when considering a cloud provider should therefore include the provider’s control and oversight of their own production chain, and how they regard each step of their supply chain, down to their purchasing philosophy.
Importantly, full control over the supply chain allows cloud providers to choose and control all equipment while considering sustainability and economies of scale. It means providers can select components for easy reuse, recyclability, and repair, rather than work with standard components that may not necessarily be environmentally friendly.
Additionally, responsible cloud providers should be able to clearly outline how they have factored sustainability into each link of their supply chain, which in turn helps businesses better understand and clarify the sustainability of their own technology operations. For instance, when a data centre needs more servers, the instinctive reaction may be to produce more servers to accommodate. However, the environmentally responsible action is to consider whether existing servers can be reallocated among data centres, rather than create new ones.
Another example is the extent to which a cloud provider considers the reusability of their infrastructures, servers, and components. Often, an easy option is to scrap these materials when they are no longer needed but cloud providers can look towards expanding the lifespan of these parts and considering how extra components can be offered second lives in other functions or businesses, and whether servers can be moved or repurposed, rather than disposed of.
Lastly, purchasing also has an important role to play within a sustainable supply chain, and a cloud provider’s purchasing philosophy is another significant reflection of its sustainability position. While purchasers’ primary focus is to enable a cloud provider to operate under the best conditions, they should be thinking more broadly about how their purchasing can impact the local economic network, general society, and the environment.
Complementing the above initiatives with establishing reliable measurement of carbon footprint, through the use of carbon calculators is an equally important step that cloud providers can undertake Providing a quantifiable measurement metric allows businesses to assess the environmental impact of their cloud activities to efficiently monitor and strategise on ways to manage, decrease or compensate energy consumption levels as they evolve. Ultimately, this provides businesses with a complete picture of their actual carbon footprint, providing greater transparency while also encouraging more responsible IT usage across the industry.
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Greening businesses will take an ecosystem
While the road to sustainability is not straightforward, it is becoming one that businesses must inevitably embark on. After all, end-users which are consumers themselves, are demanding urgent action from government and business leaders alike, with an overwhelming 63% of Apac consumers considering climate change a global emergency. With growing pressure to ramp up sustainability efforts to achieve net-zero ambitions by 2050, more and stricter regulations are expected to urge business action on the sustainability front.
With sustainability high on corporate and regulatory agendas, there can be no more reason to neglect sustainability when choosing a cloud provider. It may not be easy to confirm a cloud provider’s position on sustainability but a careful look at factors such as their resource efficiency indicators, control over their production chain, how they manage their supply chain, and their purchasing philosophy can provide valuable insight.
Especially as businesses continue to boost their sustainability strategies, they will benefit from working with like-minded suppliers who can partner with them to forge a clear, bright path towards a more ethical, socially responsible and greener future. The first step to this? Turning the eye on sustainability across all sides of the business operations, including their technology providers.
Terry Maiolo is VP and GM for APAC at OVHcloud
