Sustainability and humanity’s response to climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. And luckily, this is becoming more important for most companies, across all different industries.

At Capgemini we set a bold ambition: We will achieve carbon neutrality no later than 2025 and become a net zero business by 2030. This means accelerating our approach to carbon reduction across our key impact areas. And together with reducing our own environmental impacts for a net zero future, we also want to help our clients to transform to a low carbon future.

And one area where organizations can become more carbon efficient is by using public cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure. A study from 2018 found that using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform can be up to 93 percent more energy efficient and up to 98 percent more carbon efficient than on-premises solutions. This study looked at four services, which are responsible for nearly half of the energy consumed in the Microsoft datacenters: Azure Compute, Azure Storage, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online. In January 2020, Microsoft announced that they will be carbon negative by 2030.

To help achieve this goal, the Microsoft Azure data centers provide an incredible opportunity to give back to all the communities where they operate. And for this, Microsoft Azure has committed to focus on the following key areas of environmental impact:

  • Carbon: 100% renewable energy by 2025

  • Water: Water positive by 2030, replenish more water than which is consumed

  • Waste: Zero waste certification by 2030

  • Ecosystems: Net-zero deforestation from new construction

These commitments and investments will not only help Microsoft to reach their goals and reduce their environmental impact, but it will also bring huge opportunities for all clients and partners to achieve their own sustainability goals.

And in addition to the benefits that on-premises datacenter migrations to cloud solutions can bring, enterprises are also looking for additional insights into the carbon impact of their cloud workloads. These impacts can then help them to make more sustainable computer decisions. Microsoft has released a Power BI application called the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator, to provide clients those new insights.

The Microsoft Sustainability Calculator for valuable insights

The Microsoft Sustainability Calculator gives clients valuable insights about their carbon emissions data associated with their Azure services. It gives the ability to quantify the carbon impact of each Azure subscription over a period, datacenter regions, and the estimated savings from running those workloads in on-premises datacenters vs Azure.

The calculations are based on the Azure consumption, and it uses the energy requirements of the Azure services, the energy mix of the electric grid serving the hosting datacenters, Microsoft’s procurement of renewable energy in those datacenters and the emissions associated with the transfer of data over the internet as input. The result is an estimate of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, measured in total metric tons of carbon equivalent (MTCO2e) related to a customer’s consumption of Azure.

The calculator will also give a granular overview of all the estimated emissions savings from your running workloads on Azure. For that it takes into account, Microsoft’s IT operational efficiency, IT equipment efficiency, and datacenter infrastructure efficiency compared to that of a typical on-premises deployment.

Get started with the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator

Azure Enterprise customers can get started with the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator by downloading the Power BI application from AppSource. There, you can download and install the application.

One thing to note, is that you need to have access to the Azure Enterprise Portal as an admin and you need to have the current tenant ID of your Azure tenant.

To get started, you can use the following sources:

An excellent way to become more carbon efficient

In this blog I have highlighted our sustainable transformation goals at Capgemini and how we want to help our clients to transform to a low carbon future. Embracing cloud services and migrate workloads from on-premises datacenters to the cloud, is one step that will definitely have a positive impact at achieving these goals.

In line with Capgemini’s sustainable transformation and vision, Microsoft also commits to a sustainable future and has invested heavily in achieving this. Microsoft Azure brings you the benefits of these investments and commitments to help achieve your own sustainability goals.

If you want more information about our investments and commitments to environmental sustainability, you can look at our website, or you can download our Environmental Sustainability report.