Embracing Modernization with a Sustainability Focus

Introduction

In this blog, we explore an approach to modernization in the cloud with a sustainability focus, its importance, benefits, and ways businesses can leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive sustainable practices. IT modernization has become essential for businesses to stay competitive and efficient in this rapidly evolving digital world. Many organizations are moving to cloud technologies as it offers benefits like speed to market, scalability, resiliency, enhanced security, and cost savings. While organizations are advancing technologically, it is important to consider the environmental impact of these changes and ensure that digital transformation aligns with sustainability goals. Businesses that implement “Twin Transformation”, crossing digital technologies and sustainability, are 2.5 times more likely to outperform their peers, according to the European double up report by Accenture.

Modernization involves utilizing cloud-based services and technologies to transform outdated infrastructure, improve operational efficiency, enhance scalability, improve resource productivity and enable innovation. Sustainability involves reducing carbon emissions, responsible resource management and minimizing waste. Traditional IT infrastructure leverages physical servers that consume significant amounts of energy, require extensive cooling systems, and contribute to electronic waste. It is projected that, moving from on-premises to the cloud will reduce energy consumption by 65% and carbon emissions by 84%, according to the Accenture report, The green behind the cloud.

Importance and Benefits

Modernization with a sustainability focus is critical for minimizing the environmental impact of IT operations, reducing energy consumption, and conserving valuable resources like energy, water, and materials. Per the nextgov.com report, Government tech – What’s sustainability got to do with it?, it is estimated that data centers currently account for 2% of the U.S. energy consumption, which is 10 to 50 times more than an average commercial building. These data centers are large consumers of energy and water. Optimizing cloud computing will result in greater sustainability and increased cost savings. According to the AWS sustainability report, How moving onto the AWS cloud reduces carbon emissions, it is projected that customers who are running compute-heavy workloads on AWS cloud can see their carbon emissions reduced by up to 99%. This staggering figure breaks down into an estimated 94% reduction just from migrating those workloads from on-premises infrastructure to the AWS cloud, with an additional 81% savings enabled by AWS’s purpose-built silicon.

The sustainability benefits are equally impressive for storage-heavy workloads. Customers can achieve carbon emissions reductions of up to 93% from the move to AWS cloud and a further 47% from leveraging AWS clouds modernized architecture. Responsible corporate citizens are prioritizing sustainability, either by utilizing the cloud or building emerging technologies to help achieve sustainability. Embracing sustainability practices not only results in reduced carbon footprint, but also results in optimized processes, increased efficiency, and substantial cost savings.

Key Strategies for Modernization

Current environment assessment – Start with an inventory of your current IT landscape and understand your current carbon footprint. For on-premises resources, conduct a comprehensive assessment of IT infrastructure, including data centers, servers, and applications. Identify legacy applications, high-energy consuming systems, and inefficient processes contributing to your carbon emissions. Utilize energy audits, carbon accounting software, sustainability reports, or third-party consultants to quantify your carbon footprint. Leverage AWS Application Discovery Service to gather information about on-premises data centers and plan migration projects. Moving to the cloud not only helps with sustainability goals, but can also reduce licensing and hardware costs. Once resources are running on the AWS cloud, leverage services like the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool to estimate and track carbon emissions associated with cloud usage. AWS Migration Hub helps to track the progress of application migrations across AWS and partner services.
Virtualization and cloud computing – Leverage virtualization and cloud computing technologies for efficient use of hardware resources and reduce the overall number of physical servers required. Leverage cloud and virtualization technologies like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to optimize hardware utilization and minimize physical servers, enabling scalable and secure virtual environments for applications and containers.
Energy efficiency and green data centers – By upgrading to energy efficient servers and storage systems, data centers can significantly reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint. Leverage cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT), for optimizing energy usage, streamlining operational processes, and facilitating data-driven decision making. Utilize AWS IoT Services for collecting and analyzing IoT data, and Amazon SageMaker for building and deploying machine learning models, all aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and intelligent decision-making.
Choosing cloud providers – Gartner predicts that by 2025, the carbon emissions of hyperscale cloud services will be a top three criterion in cloud purchase decisions. Consider cloud providers like AWS committed to sustainability and prioritize renewable energy sources, net-zero carbon initiatives, and environment friendly practices.
Serverless architecture – Serverless computing is a key technology that is redefining the way enterprises build, consume, and integrate cloud-native applications, according to the Gartner article The CIO’s Guide to Serverless Computing. Leverage serverless computing to eliminate the need for provisioning and managing servers and only pay for the actual computing time used by the applications. This enables optimized resource utilization, improved scalability as resources are automatically scaled based on demand resulting in reduced energy waste and cost savings. Utilize AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning servers, paying for compute time only. Use Amazon API Gateway to create, publish, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
Efficient data management – Implement efficient data lifecycle management practices by periodically assessing and archiving unnecessary data to minimize storage requirements; resulting in lower energy consumption and reduced carbon footprint. Implement centralized data protection and backup with AWS Backup for efficient data lifecycle management. Archive and store long-term backups with low-cost, secure cloud storage using Amazon Glacier.
E-waste Management – Proper disposal and recycling of electronic waste generated during IT modernization is crucial.

AWS Sustainability approach

AWS approach to sustainability stems from enhancing energy efficiency, pivoting to renewable energy, reducing carbon, and using water responsibly. AWS has a goal of operating all operations at 100% renewable energy by 2025 and reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2024.

Increasing efficiency – AWS focuses on efficiency at scale on all aspects of the infrastructure, from data center design to hardware deployment. AWS is continuously improving processes to decrease energy needed to operate data centers. According to the AWS sustainability report, How moving onto the AWS cloud reduces carbon emissions, AWS infrastructure is approximately 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of the surveyed U.S enterprise data centers and up to approximately 5 times more efficient than the average European enterprise data centers. Before data centers are built, AWS can predict and learn how to improve operations by using advanced modeling methods such as computational fluid dynamic tools and real-time physics-based models. AWS uses real-time weather and sensor data to adapt to changing conditions to optimize cooling, one of the largest sources of energy usage.
Renewable energy – Amazon works with energy companies and invests in new wind and solar projects in order to power data centers. These projects in turn also support hundreds of jobs while investing in local communities. In 2022, it is estimated that AWS attributed 100% renewable energy to 19 AWS Regions electricity consumption.
Reducing indirect carbon emissions – AWS is focused on reducing carbon emissions associated with building data centers and manufacturing hardware. Initiatives include lower-carbon concrete and steel to build the data centers, reducing embodied emissions associated with the manufacturing of hardware, including silicon-based devices, and using more sustainable fuels such as hydrotreated vegetable oil to power backup generators for data centers in Europe.
Increasing the life of technology – AWS enables customers to build sustainability solutions for carbon tracking, energy conservation, and waste reduction. The AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool helps measure carbon emissions and provides easy to understand data visualizations on emissions from AWS cloud usage. The tool analyzes the changes in emissions over time as workloads are migrated to AWS cloud and forecasts how emissions will change as Amazon progresses toward powering operations with 100% renewable energy.

Conclusion

Integrating sustainability into modernization initiatives not only benefits the environment, but also enhances operational efficiency, reduces cost, and improves speed-to-market. By embracing cloud-native technologies, organizations can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, improve resource utilization, and build a greener future. AWS commitment to renewable energy and energy efficiency reinforces the importance of incorporating sustainability into modernization efforts.

Migration & Modernization