While there is nothing to sugarcoat the pressures on businesses and government departments to meet NetZero carbon targets, most IT leaders have the added strain of trying to keep up with the demands of new technologies. It's a constant balancing act between enabling people to work and perform better, while addressing ESG compliance and not draining IT budgets.
Automation now dominates the thinking of IT buyers. New products and tools continue to emerge. Recently, Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke about the enormous potential of AI assistants, for example, suggesting that the race is on for organizations to develop powerful AI assistants that could reshape the digital landscape, endangering companies like Google and Amazon. He suggested that these AI assistants could radically change behaviors that affect everyday life and work. We've already seen an element of this with ChatGPT, while Microsoft has already made a move in this direction with the announcement of its Copilot AI assistant for 365.
The fact is that automation is attractive to organizations for its productivity, efficiency and overcoming skills shortages, but it can come at a cost, both financial and environmental. As Gartner warned in its 10 Strategic Predictions for 2023, AI carries increased sustainability risk. By 2025, he says, “AI will consume more energy than the human workforce, significantly offsetting zero-carbon gains.” With this in mind, surely something needs to be done now to enable AI without undermining environmental efforts.
Meeting ESG objectives is, at least according to Deloitte, a more prominent topic in boardrooms this year, so how organizations balance this with greater automation needs will be key. Cloud computing is, of course, critical to enabling AI tools in organizations. Digital transformations to implement platforms that unify organizations and therefore data are driving cloud adoption.
As Gartner recently revealed, global cloud spending is expected to reach around $600 billion this year, driven primarily by emerging technologies such as generative AI. Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner, says generative AI requires “powerful, highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real time,” and the cloud offers “the perfect solution and platform.”
cloud burst
And yet, the cloud continues to be dogged by accusations that it is bad for the environment and does not help organizations achieve their ESG compliance goals. In fact, the cloud industry has been one of the most active in trying to increase efficiency and reduce environmental impact. The demand for cloud services is such that it is inevitably difficult to keep up. Mounting more racks in a data center is a short-term solution, but it's not really a long-term answer, especially given the increase in power demands to handle more automation.
In our Enterprise Cloud Index research, 85% of 1,450 IT decision makers recognized that achieving corporate sustainability goals is a challenge for them. While almost everyone (92%) said sustainability was a much more important issue than a year ago, there is clearly a disconnect between what organizations want to achieve and how they achieve it. What we have seen is that there are major challenges that arise from a combination of complexity and IT budget constraints.
Our research shows that most organizations use more than one type of IT infrastructure, whether it's a combination of public and private clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premises data center, along with a hosted data center. This will only grow, but mixed infrastructures create new management challenges. Given increasing complexity, organizations need a single, unified place to manage applications and data across their diverse environments, to reduce costs but also to measure impacts.
Increasing efficiency in data processes is an important step in reducing “impacts” on IT systems, but in reality this is only part of the way. The real change for any organization operating in the cloud is looking at the underlying infrastructure. Measuring and then managing the impacts of data centers will continue to be key to reducing the carbon impacts of organizational computing. Just like with a car, if you have a smaller but more powerful and efficient engine, you will not only reduce emissions, but you will leave room for growth and greater performance, through tools like AI.
Reframe the image
As Atlantic Ventures suggests in its report Improving Sustainability in Data Centers, the energy demand needed in data centers remains very high and generates large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions. Energy consumption is an important factor in measuring the environmental performance of data centers, but a traditional method is now being questioned.
Basically, the changes must be made to the frame. Infrastructure modernization starts with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), reducing “moving parts” and therefore energy needs. This also means less complexity, both in terms of cloud structures and data management. This is what will achieve the most direct results.
As Atlantic Ventures says, “in the EMEA region, HCI architectures have the potential to reduce up to 56.68 TWh between 2022 and 2025 and save up to €8.22 billion in electricity costs in the same period for enterprises and service center providers.” data that undertake a complete transformation towards HCI.” This, combined with next-generation liquid cooling, is a big step towards creating a low-impact platform for the future.
For any organization looking to adopt AI and related automation applications, addressing infrastructure complexity is now key. Data center management is an increasingly specialized business (especially given high energy prices) and as more and more real-time data is required, the challenges for organizations are only increasing. . With the right partners and the most efficient infrastructure, any organization could consider itself AI-ready without sacrificing ESG goals.
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