Colombia. We are immersed in a world where technology is our right hand in the development of companies. And we cannot ignore that the automation of many processes allows us to save costs and increase production, however, are companies being sustainable when they use this type of tools?
Schneider Electric, together with the consulting firm 451 Research, conducted a survey of more than 1,150 companies around the world representing more than 20 vertical sectors. In this survey, they validated their sustainability efforts with distributed IT resources, and analysts determined that many companies believe they are more advanced on their sustainability path than they actually are.
"For this group, the main driver of sustainability is business value, and companies start by measuring energy use, then expand to other sustainability metrics and tools. The biggest challenges on their path to sustainability are optimizing energy use, followed by obtaining consistent data and metrics (for leading/advanced companies) and lack of qualified personnel (for start-up organizations)," said Sebastian Brunno, Vice President for South America for Secure Power at Schneider Electric.
As far as data collection is concerned, it is necessary to establish workloads, contemplating the feasibility of including Edge Computing. This means that organizations increasingly need to add infrastructure at the edge to store and analyze data, as well as network connectivity to transport the data to the headquarters.
It is estimated that the global electricity used by IT teams in edge environments (server rooms, micro data centers, data centers with <100kW of power) was 140 terawatt hours in 2021. This is growing rapidly, as IoT and 5G applications produce increasing amounts of data that is stored near devices.
Schneider Electric's projections foresee that data center energy consumption will be 2,700 terawatt hours by 2040 and that 60% of that consumption will come from distributed sites. This translates into more equipment, more energy use, and therefore more items to track.
Edge Computing, the best ally
There are several reasons to deploy distributed IT infrastructure or infrastructure at the edge and definitions of "distributed" vary. These definitions can include deployments outside the primary enterprise data center, such as regional data centers, backup/disaster recovery sites, network points of presence, print servers in data centers, and infrastructure for the Internet of Things that are as close as necessary to where the data is generated and consumed.
Looking specifically at IoT workloads that tend to generate large and growing volumes of data, 41% of respondents said they have IoT projects in use and the other 42% have projects in discovery/proof of concept or plan to implement IoT within two years.
At the same time, businesses around the world are looking to improve their carbon footprint and sustainability profile, while the growing amount of distributed IT has an increasing impact on the environment.
This survey on enterprise sustainability and Edge and distributed IT data centers surveyed IT decision makers from more than 1,150 companies based in China, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. These organizations included medium and large companies representing vertical sectors, including retail, healthcare, IT, education, financial services, and industrial manufacturing. Respondents were required to have knowledge of business sustainability programs as well as distributed IT and data center resources.
