Everything my company runs on is cloud-based — what can we do to address environmental sustainability?
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CxO and Startup Advisor in Software2 years ago
Environmental sustainability is a shared responsibility when you are in the cloud, just like security. In the case of AWS or any of the other cloud providers, they take care of the data center, and you take care of everything above it. Similarly, every company that uses a public cloud service provider has a huge role to play in understanding the impact of the services they run, the behaviors of their users and the impact of what they're doing with their environments. It's not enough to push the problem. I’ve heard people say, “We are 100%, in the cloud, so there's no control from our standpoint.” But I disagree with that statement because if a company like AWS has been able to create a new chip called Graviton, which is 60% more energy efficient, and I am not using it, then I'm not playing the role that I should be playing in environmental sustainability. It's not enough to say, “They're doing everything and I'm just going to piggyback on their success,” because, as companies, we all have our part in the shared model. There's a lot of work to be done by every company, and that aspect is very important.
President and National Managing Principal in Software2 years ago
I didn't know what AWS was investing in, so they need to promote that. Companies need to sell that more. As this information becomes more available, you can make buying decisions based on that. But you also make an excellent point; I hadn't thought of the types of applications that we're running, and the processing required, etc., but those things have an impact as well.
CEO in Manufacturing2 years ago
If you look at your entire company and infrastructure, you're dependent on whatever cloud provider you're going after. The cloud is a data center somewhere — it just happens to be managed by somebody else. And the choices they make inside of their infrastructure now go right back to all the customers on top.
Whatever we decide, as a company, we should at least think about this stuff. How can we not only be environmentally friendly, but also think about these things from a social perspective — how can we give back to underprivileged communities? Something as simple as a three- to five-year-old MacBook could be a major benefit to someone that never had access to that before. So, even though it's not as obvious, when it comes to environmental sustainability, there are things we can do with as little as endpoints, mice, keyboards and monitors. We can address what we’ll do with this waste once it gets to the end of the life cycle, make sure it doesn't have a negative impact on the environment, and provide equipment to the underprivileged folks that could really use it.