Microsoft announced a new cloud offering in preview at Inspire digital event that aims to address carbon emissions. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is designed to enable organizations to measure, understand and take charge of carbon emissions, set sustainability goals, and take action.
Accelerating the sustainability journey of organizations
Microsoft’s new solution offers a set of comprehensive, integrated, and automated insights for organizations to accelerate their sustainability journey. It includes SaaS offerings that can discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide carbon accounting, measure performance, and provide insights. Some examples of possible scenarios are:
- CIOs will be able to easily report on IT carbon emissions from the cloud, devices, and applications as part of their department’s environmental footprint. They will then be able to connect their emissions data sources into one view for reporting.
- Companies will be able to offer their customers a sustainability scorecard to track progress against their carbon emission reduction goals, inclusive of scope 1-3 emissions (emissions from a company’s owned sources, emissions from purchased energy, and all other emissions).
- Customers will be able to pinpoint specific emission areas and track if they are meeting their emission reduction goals. For instance, if an HVAC system is not on track to meet its prescribed emissions reduction target, the task can be assigned to operations to make the necessary improvements to reach that target.