Tech giant, Microsoft announced the general availability of its Emissions Impact Dashboard as a part of the company’s commitment to address its own environmental impact. The dashboard allows cloud customers to understand, track, report, analyze, and reduce carbon emissions associated with their cloud usage. Microsoft also introduced a new cloud offering, named Cloud for Sustainability, a few months ago allowing organizations to reduce the environmental impact.
Cloud sustainability
Emissions Impact Dashboard was originally introduced in January of 2020 as the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator. The dashboard is designed to provide customers meaningful, shareable information and critical insights to allow them to make more informed, data-driven decisions. The dashboard shares information about the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the usage of Microsoft cloud services.
With the dashboard, organizations will be able to measure the impact and the carbon footprint of the services they used. The dashboard also provides an estimate of emissions savings by enabling customers to enter un-migrated workloads. With its data protection feature, administrators can control who can see their company data on the dashboard.
Microsoft also introduced a new feature for the dashboard allowing users to calculate the Scope 3 emissions associated with their cloud usage. It includes indirect emissions that can occur across the product value chain. Microsoft stated that Scope 3 activities are mostly the largest source of emissions, which can be tricky to measure.