Across all industries and locations, businesses are working hard to be more sustainable. A sustainability focus helps the environment and a business’s bottom line. A sustainable business adds brand value and a competitive advantage whilst reducing operational cost. Massive corporations, such as Microsoft and Apple, have pledged to become carbon neutral, with many smaller businesses following suit. However, becoming a sustainable business is not a simple task, it requires significant time and planning. Carry on reading if you want your business to be more sustainable.
Migrate On-Premises Infrastructure to the Azure Cloud
Migrating to the Azure Cloud has many benefits for a business. Moving to Azure allows businesses to only pay for what they use. With legacy on-premises infrastructure, businesses will have a significant upfront cost as well as maintenance costs. When the business needs to upgrade they will have to upgrade all of the hardware and the process could take months.
This directly relates to the environmental impact of on-premises infrastructure. When a business installs on-premises infrastructure, there is an embodied carbon impact from manufacturing the infrastructure and operating carbon impact from running it. Running these workloads in Azure reduces the embodied carbon impact as new infrastructure doesn’t need to be built to upgrade resources. Operating carbon is also reduced, as Microsoft has implemented next generation server cooling methods that reduce energy use.
Go Paperless with an E-Signature Solution
Back in 2019, the average employee printed around 8000 pages per year. This obviously has a significant environmental impact through the production of printers, paper, and ink. With Microsoft 365, all documents can be electronically shared and don’t need to be printed. Businesses still print documents and contracts for signing by new employees, vendors, and other key stakeholders. With an e-signature solution, such as DocuSign, businesses can go paperless to reduce their carbon emissions and overall costs.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
At Microsoft Ignite in 2021, they announced the preview release of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. The solution connects real-time data sources to provide accurate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals and enable intelligent insights to make more effective action. This will help businesses track their emissions to ensure they are on course to meet their sustainability goals, and if they’re not, the solution will give actionable insights to help them meet them.
What’s Next?
Over the next decade it will become increasingly important for businesses to have a sustainability strategy. This will help the environment and increase profitability as consumers will continue to place more importance on a business’s sustainability. If you want to find out more about how technology can help your business reach your sustainability goals, get in touch with us today.
Previous
