When the World Economic Forum (WEF) set up the Global Lighthouse Network to bring together manufacturers using technologies to transform businesses towards sustainability goals, big tech companies were assumed to be playing a supporting role. However, going forward, it may be worth noting that IT giants, more specifically CIOs could end up playing a crucial role.
IBM CIO Kathryn Guarini feels that going forward this would be so, given that IT technology is not only a source for emissions, but also a tool to address an enterprise’s sustainability impact. In a chat with SDxCentral, the IBM official says technology must be leveraged for driving progress that is required to reduce carbon footprint.
Three levels sustainability approach
She said IBM approaches IT sustainability at three levels starting from how to adopt hybrid cloud and sustainable computing, reducing electronic waste and energy consumption, and using the technology to generate data insights that helps the company take action to improve its sustainability goals.
“We think about leveraging technology for insights, for driving the progress that we need to reduce our carbon footprint, and [for shifting] to a very intentional approach to achieving the goals that we’ve collectively set at a company level and a societal level. There’s a really important role that we play as leaders in business — and in IT, in particular,” she said.
What can CIOs do in this regard?
Currently, the environmental impact of computing arises from the use of fossil fuel-based energy consumption. Given the non-negotiable nature of reducing this impact, the challenge is that use of artificial intelligence workloads significantly adds to energy consumption compared to the traditional computing options. However, the same AI can be used to optimize power utilization at data centers, thus reducing carbon footprint, Guarini says.
From a CIO’s perspective, the sustainability goals would not be to shift everything to AI-led computing, but use data-led insights to understand how much could become too much. The idea is to be sure that one is not creating a bigger problem for the future instead of removing challenges of the present, the official said.
Besides prioritizing the use of renewable energy sources where possible, CIOs can find means to sourcing the company’s energy needs with a well-defined slant towards renewables. These officials have the requisite influence through their purchasing power of technologies, which can be utilized to nudge even suppliers towards these goals.
CIOs must leverage the purchasing power
Not to mention the role that CIOs play in defining the physical locations where large companies deploy their workforce. Being carbon-aware is something that these leaders should aim for whereby choosing a sustainable public cloud or private data center could end up being the key difference between achieving sustainability goals or missing them.
In fact, IBM is already betting big on hybrid clouds as we reported recently. The company paid $4.6 billion in cash to buy Apptio, a company that has built a platform to track how and where data lives in hybrid environments, its use and more specifically how they perform on financial and resource costs.
Guarini said choice of a sustainable solution for data center operations could be influenced due to the massive purchasing power that companies such as IBM have. The nature of hybrid cloud flexibility provides an enterprise with the ability to move workloads more seamlessly across different environments. IBM’s latest acquisition, which is likely to be closed in a couple of months, ties in with the company’s long-term strategy to get more products and services in the hybrid cloud fold.
By acquiring Apptio, IBM hopes to enhance its services and systems integrations business and more specifically provide customers with a more robust set of tools to set up and manage the hybrid cloud infrastructure that more and more businesses are shifting towards these days. The hybrid approach can optimize workload location-based on the amount of renewable energy available on the regional power grids.
At a global level, sustainability issues sit on top of challenges accumulated over many decades, which is why technology companies need to step in and take up some of these using the very tech that they propagate. There are some key levers that can help, she says, pointing to solutions, technologies that help move the needle, and action that will lead in the right direction.
