Going Green: The Business of Embracing Sustainability

Organizations increasingly understand the importance of investing in sustainable business practices. But a sustainable business is all but reserved for ‘green’ companies: in 2018, total global sustainability investments exceeded $30 trillion – a 68% increase since 2014 and a tenfold increase compared to 2004. What was once primarily considered a company mission to do social good is now also being acknowledged as an important business imperative. So how can sustainability be a driving force for your business?    
Going Green with Google

Global climate change is undeniably one of the most difficult challenges we as humans have ever faced. In order to avert its worst consequences, urgent action is required. One often overlooked area with enormous potential for improvement: data centers of large companies. On average, data centers consume between 2-3% of the global electricity - contributing approximately 1-2% to the total human carbon output. For comparison: that is roughly as much as the global airline industry. With the expected increases in the number of connected devices and the increasing importance and use of big data, these numbers will only increase in the coming years…

We at Google care about our planet. Since our founding in 1998, sustainability has been a core value for us: not only were we the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007, we were also the first major company to match our energy use with 100% renewable energy in 2017. Mid September, our CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google’s third decade of climate action: realizing a carbon-free future for everyone. One of the commitments is that we operate on carbon-free energy in all our data centers and campuses, worldwide, 24/7. This means that migrating your existing applications to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will reduce your organization’s digital carbon footprint.

Aside from migration to our cloud, our Cloud products can also play a pivotal role in achieving your organization’s sustainability goals and its transition to a more sustainable business. Research from U.S. government agencies has shown that computing costs, energy use, and carbon emissions decrease by 65 to 90% when switching to G Suite. Furthermore,  hardware innovations, such as our Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), have attributed to the increased efficiency in computing power: compared to five years ago, we now deliver up to seven times more computing power using the same amount of electrical power. And with the use of Machine Learning applications, we have developed smart cooling in our data centers - reducing  the energy used for cooling by 30%. Now we are making these solutions available globally. Here is how that works.

Sustainability as a Driving Force

Even though sustainable business practices are important in and of themselves, embracing sustainability as a core business principle can also be a driving force for business value, innovation, and optimization. The use of G Suite also allows for a cross-organizational culture of collaboration, which enables companies to identify opportunities for further growth and innovation – especially in the context of the current pandemic-driven imperative to work from home. Thorough data analysis by tools such as GCP’s BigQuery enables organizations to gain better insights into the interactions between elements of an organization’s system. Understanding your data can help in identifying and understanding your organizations’ sustainability challenges, as well as keep track of the execution and progress of your sustainability strategy as a whole.

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