Why Moving Workloads to Web Tech is the Key to Sustainable IT

The environmental impact of enterprise IT has reached a critical inflection point. With tech industry CO2 emissions growing at 6% annually¹, CIOs face mounting pressure to reduce their organization's carbon footprint. According to the International Energy Agency, data center electricity demand is projected to more than double between 2022 and 2026, driven largely by artificial intelligence and increased digitization. This surge in energy consumption, combined with new environmental regulations and changing consumer expectations, makes sustainable IT an urgent priority for enterprise organizations.

The Hidden Environmental Impact of Enterprise IT

The scale of IT's environmental impact is staggering and has become impossible to ignore. Research reveals that greenhouse gas emissions from cloud computing alone surpass that of the entire commercial aviation industry, yet it often flies under the radar. The growing interest in reducing the  environmental costs of enterprise IT is driven by several factors:

Regulatory Pressure

Data center emissions are the focal point of regulations. The European Union has taken a leading role, passing the updated Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), which includes a requirement that data centers within the EU with an installed power of more than 500kW publicly report their energy performance.

The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which went into effect on 5 January 2023, mandates detailed environmental impact reporting, which enables investors and other stakeholders to get access to the information they need to assess the impact companies have on the environment and people, as well as the financial risks and the opportunities that climate change and other sustainability issues, can create.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted a set of rules on 6 March 2024 called the SEC Climate Disclosure Rule. The rules require public companies and foreign private issuers to report climate-related risks, greenhouse gas emissions, and include environmental and climate-related disclosures in their financial statements, among other requirements. 

Consumer Demand

According to Forrester’s Consumer Benchmark Survey², the majority of consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia prioritize sustainability and green concerns over cost and convenience when making purchases. This demand filters through to the suppliers of the brands and companies that consumers purchase from, pushing the entire supply chain to adapt. Since the IT and cloud infrastructure that powers digital products and services represent a relatively high proportion of CO2 emissions within that supply chain, companies need to respond by focusing their efforts on reducing these emissions, and the cloud and IT companies that serve the B2B market will increasingly have to factor sustainability into their operations and vendor selection. 

The importance of sustainability in the B2B sphere is accentuated by the fact that 36% of buyers state that they would leave suppliers that fail to meet their sustainability expectations. When it comes to market value, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance has a positive impact on enterprise value. Deloitte reported that a 10-point increase in an ESG score results in an approximate 1.2x higher Enterprise Multiple, or EV/EBITDA multiple, a measure of the value of a company.

Energy Consumption Trends

AI and machine learning workloads are already driving unprecedented power demand, with some startling projections for the energy consumption associated with this technology subsection. At Google, for instance, power consumption that’s attributed to AI represents between 10-15% of its 2.3TWh power use. Industry experts interviewed by S&P Global Insights predict that by 2030, AI could account for 3-4% of global power consumption. 

The Hidden Costs of Traditional Infrastructure

Few enterprise IT organizations are running AI workloads at the scale of Google. But many opportunities exist in enterprise IT to reduce energy demand. For example, virtualized infrastructure carries substantial hidden costs that many organizations overlook. A detailed analysis reveals multiple layers of inefficiency:

Resource Utilization

Virtual machines often require minutes to spin up, wasting energy during idle time, while CAST AI founder Laurent Gil estimates that the average CPU utilization in cloud-native enterprises is around 13%¹. The latter results from developers or IT administrators over-provisioning virtual machines (VMs) in their cloud infrastructure and frequently forgetting about them. This excess capacity leads to significant energy waste.

Energy Waste

A lot of seemingly innocuous activities have a significant impact on CO2 emissions. Data transfer, for example, generates up to 3kg of CO2 per gigabyte, while data center cooling systems can consume as much energy as the computing infrastructure itself. Redundancy, a best practice for data storage, multiplies energy requirements depending on the levels of redundancy and the choices for how to ensure redundancy. The location and type of data centers can also significantly impact their energy usage. Data centers in cooler climates require less energy to cool, while public cloud data centers are estimated to be almost 4 times more energy-efficient than enterprise data centers. 

Financial Implications

Energy costs compound with inefficient resource usage, as multiple factors contribute to the overall cost. In addition to higher energy bills from operating and cooling the equipment, inefficient usage also means that the equipment is stressed more, resulting in more frequent downtime, increased maintenance and repair costs, and shorter replacement cycles. There may also be legal compliance costs associated with inefficient energy usage and reputational damage from being perceived as environmentally irresponsible. 

Web Technologies: A Path to Sustainable IT

Web technologies offer a dramatically more efficient alternative to traditional virtualized infrastructure. The benefits are both immediate and long-term:

Technical Efficiency

Startup times for web technologies are in the order of seconds or less. Contrast that with minutes for VMs, and it’s clear that traditional VMs lag behind their more contemporary counterparts when it comes to energy spent on the startup process. Web technologies also have file sizes that are up to 100 times smaller than VM files. This lowers the download times and dramatically reduces the computing resources required to run applications.

Resource Optimization

Web technologies allow for dynamic scaling based on actual usage. Instead of over-provisioning computing resources that rarely get used, as in the case of virtualization, companies only spin up what they actually need to fulfill the demand for their services. Applications can share computing resources, and web technology applications’ smaller size also reduces data transfer requirements, thereby reducing energy costs.

Geographic Benefits

As Akamai's global director of corporate sustainability, Mike Mattera notes, "The closer you get to where you are deploying your workloads, the better it becomes for your sustainability strategy." By running workloads at the edge or in distributed cloud locations and choosing public cloud vendors with regions and availability zones closest to them, companies benefit from reduced latency and improved performance, lower data transfer emissions, optimized resource distribution, and an enhanced user experience.

The Three-Tier Evolution of IT Infrastructure

The shift to web technologies represents a crucial opportunity for organizations to reduce their environmental impact while improving operational efficiency significantly. By embracing web-based workloads, companies can lead in sustainability while building a more agile, cost-effective IT infrastructure. 

Along with the shift to web technologies, enterprise IT should consider the role of the browser. The emergence of enterprise browsers as an application delivery platform addresses many of the security, governance, and visibility objectives of IT and aides in the transition to more sustainable web technologies. IT efficiency compounds further when an enterprise browser is paired with a thin client endpoint or simply enables organizations to extend the lifespan of their existing endpoints and reduce the supply chain demands for new laptops or desktops. The following table outlines the evolutionary steps that organizations can take in their journey toward sustainable IT:
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Ready to learn more about how enterprise browsers can support your sustainability goals? Discover the key features and use cases that make enterprise browsers the foundation of modern, sustainable IT infrastructure. Contact us to learn more.

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¹ _{Forrester, Build Your Sustainable Cloud To Lower Emissions And Meet Your Sustainability Goals, August 2024}

² _{Forrester, Consumer Benchmark Survey, 2024, June 2024}

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