Building an IT Sustainability Framework

Experts in modern data center technologies and sustainability provide valuable insights for building IT sustainability strategies.

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Transcript:

Mat Brown: There is a lot of regulation coming, a lot of legislation.

Andrea Osika: Between 2021 and 2022 there was an 80% increase in regs that encompass ESG.

Harmail Chatha: If you’re going to build a sustainability strategy, budget should be the starting point. By consolidating the hardware, you’re reducing your power footprint by 35%.

Jason Lopez: What you’re about to hear are the highlights from a breakout session for IT pros who attended the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Chicago. The speakers are from Nutanix, Andrea Osika, who is laser-focused on sustainability in ESG, Mat Brown, technical marketing manager, along with Harmel Chatha, who leads global hybrid multi-cloud operations. They work on sustainability issues, which are reported in Nutanix’s annual Environmental, Social, and Governance report. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast. If your IT organization is trying to navigate ESG, this segment sheds light on IT sustainability trends and insights Nutanix has gained from evolving its own sustainability efforts. They reveal their experiences in adapting to various waves of change, including uptime and costs, security and regulations, particularly around carbon compliance and the management of greenhouse emissions through FinOps and AIOps. Andrea Osika starts off with this: as sustainability becomes increasingly central to business operations and strategy, IT professionals and executives will be expected to adapt to, in fact, their performance often measured by, a focus on ESG.

[Related: Data Center Decisions Draw on Sustainability Strategies]

Andrea Osika: When I started in this space, a lot of very large companies mostly had initiatives around this. And it was kind of seen as a nice-to-have. But if you think about the definition of sustainability and balancing today versus tomorrow, there’s business value that’s involved. And it turns out that companies who set short-term goals and balance those with sustainability metrics have actually outperformed the market in the last 10 years. So this has made investors take notice. Depending on what app you use to look at your publicly traded stocks, you might see now a sustainability tab. And we’re going to add on top of that an energy crisis and more environmentally-minded customers and even talent that your organization wants to attract and hire and then even retain. They’re all paying attention to what different organizations are doing in this space, particularly in Europe, in the UK, over in Asia. There are all kinds of pending and imposed regulations that are coming. I have been attending so many webinars and working with consultants to try and keep up. It seems like the goalpost is almost moving as we try to find a way to standardize and communicate all of these metrics. And one way is through an ESG report. I know I throw acronyms around. I’ve said it a couple of times, but environmental, social, and governance.

Jason Lopez: The 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index Report, or ECI, showed that 95% of IT professionals saw sustainability becoming more crucial in business decisions. The more recent 2024 ECI report shows IT pros are actively integrating sustainability strategies with their IT modernization efforts. Many organizations have become more data-driven about sustainability. 51% of organizations say they improved their ability to identify areas for reducing waste. 44% indicate they improved their ability to monitor and measure greenhouse gas emissions, as well as their carbon footprint. In the breakout session, Nutanix experts explained how the environmental impact of technology goes deeper than power usage and metrics. There’s the lifecycle of IT hardware, starting with the mining of metals and minerals, the manufacturing process, packaging, shipping, the management of devices in an IT setting, and the eventual disposal of the devices. Mat Brown identified a starting point for a business case. Dive into getting educated about sustainability facts, build relationships with like-minded individuals and organizations, plan and implement, identify the metrics relevant to the organization’s operations, and automate the measurement of those metrics.

[Related: 4 Steps for Building an IT Sustainability Strategy]

Mat Brown: IT is both a big part o...