“With the webinar asking “Can we measure and optimise digital services for Sustainability, ‘retrofitting’ them to improve speed and reduce cost?”, we thought that would be a good a place as any to start. Is ‘retrofitting’ systems possible and more importantly, is it really worth it?
For Anne, having ambitious sustainable targets is not enough if they aren’t accompanied by tangible plans for action and followed by accurate measures, tracking, and reporting. This is really where green metrics come into play, allowing organisations to compare collected data against their objectives, thereby evaluating the effectiveness of their strategic initiatives.
Anne is a fan of the new, greener platforms being built, but laments the difficulty for clients to be able to move to new platforms with ease, effectively tied in by incumbents. Pivoting the conversation towards metrics, Claire and Anne discussed the relative pros and cons of using carbon, performance and cost metrics to measure an organisation’s digital estate.
Carbon can be very difficult to measure accurately - just because you buy renewable energy doesn’t mean your compute is necessarily using renewable energy. Fluctuations in energy supply and demand can also mean that on a forecasted sunny day, which doesn’t deliver sun, fossil fuel is used instead to power whatever should’ve been running on renewable. This information is often only available afterwards.
Anne likens this to looking in the rear mirror to drive forward: these metrics measure what has happened, not what should be happening going forwards. She is a firm proponent of using cost and performance as valuable proxy metrics in cloud and on prem, respectively.
To see this, and plenty more, explored in greater detail, we urge you to book your space for our free webinar from 11am – 12pm on Monday 17th June. You can find more information here, and register whilst there.
