Since January 1, 2022, companies of all sizes have been required by the EU Taxonomy Regulation to report on the sustainability of their business activities. At the same time, they should actively promote the development toward climate neutrality. This is because investments are increasingly directed toward companies that are well-prepared for sustainability. Therefore, the focus must also be on IT, as it has a high energy consumption and its CO2 footprint is often enormous. Both the sustainability reports and the gradual achievement of climate neutrality will require significant effort. However, this effort can be significantly reduced by combining the necessary with the beneficial: Observability solutions not only ensure IT stability but can also provide essential data for the CO2 balance of entire IT architectures.
The EU Taxonomy Regulation came into effect in early 2022 as part of the Green Deal from July 2020. Its goals include increasing investments in sustainability, protecting investors from potential greenwashing, and helping companies become more climate-friendly i.e., improving their energy efficiency and neutralizing their CO2 footprint as much as possible. For this adjustment to climate change, new reporting obligations for companies are in place: they must create Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports to demonstrate sustainable business practices, making them more attractive for investment. One of the most significant factors in the energy balance of many companies today is, of course, IT.
Data centers and telecommunications networks consumed around 14.9 TWh of electricity in Germany in 2019, which is an increase of 45% compared to 2010. Data center capacities have roughly doubled between 2010 and 2020, while energy demand continued to rise. According to a study by Bitkom, by 2022, about 3,000 large data centers and another 50,000 small data centers and IT installations consumed 16 TWh per year, more than the entire city of Berlin. This calculation does not even include the energy required to manufacture servers and network components, nor for data transportation. Cooling hardware and data storage followed as the second and third largest energy consumers. Energy needs could rise to 23 to 29 TWh by 2030. This increase is partly driven by the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is currently considered an “energy hog” in research. For example, a text-generating AI tool consumed as much electricity during training as 40 average American households in one year.
Additionally, blockchain and especially cloud technologies are being used more frequently. A 2019 study by the French The Shift Project predicted that by 2025, the CO2 emissions of the digital economy would account for 8% of total emission, exceeding the combination of cars and motorcycles.
At the same time, the energy efficiency of IT is increasing due to the use of renewable energy sources, the production of long-lasting hardware with improved environmental footprints, and resource-saving software development. Significant progress has also been made in reducing the energy consumption of PCs. Data centers powered 100% by green energy from wind power, where waste heat is used ecologically (e.g., for an algae farm), are already emerging. However, the path to Green IT has only just begun, and a resource-efficient use of IT components throughout their entire lifecycle is still in its early stages. According to a McKinsey study, laptops, smartphones, and printers leave a much larger CO2 footprint than data centers, producing 1.5 to 2 times more CO2 worldwide.
In light of the EU Taxonomy Regulation and the new reporting obligations, significantly reducing energy consumption and CO2 footprints in IT use and component manufacturing remains a major challenge. However, companies often lack a structured approach and particularly the transparency to check the energy consumption and sustainability of all components within an architecture. There are, however, effective solutions available.
Companies driving their digital transformation in a state-of-the-art manner have already developed classic monitoring into more meaningful incident lists and, in particular, more efficient observability solutions. These allow real-time access to all relevant performance data from IT architectures through metrics, logs, and traces. Metrics provide classic trend graphs in combination with time-stamped log anomalies, and traces (based on transactions) are used as a third dimension to understand disruptions. Observability not only highlights irregularities but also explains their causes, significantly saving valuable time when fixing issues, sometimes in real time with the help of AI solutions. This method has shown great success, particularly in quickly identifying and solving new, unknown problems, which is why large IT organizations are building or already expanding their observability solutions.
Such a comprehensive analysis of IT is also possible in terms of its energy efficiency and sustainability. For example, with Carbon Impact from Dynatrace. This observability application helps calculate the CO2 footprint of an entire infrastructure. Using agent technology, collected data is converted into CO2 consumption based on an appropriate model. This provides detailed values on the footprint of data centers, processes, and applications. It can show, for example, underutilized instances or the largest carbon dioxide emitters within a specific host group. Carbon Impact uses usage metrics for CPUs, memory, disks, and networks to calculate their CO2 equivalents and display them in dashboards.
This allows for the sustainability of individual components as well as entire architectures to be checked, such as comparing selected periods to assess the resulting CO2 values. This way, those responsible can understand which components and configurations should be optimized for better energy efficiency and systematic development toward CO2 neutrality. For sustainability, along with Dynatrace, other providers like SPLUNK and Alluvio Aternity have also developed very interesting solutions.
Integrating such solutions is extremely valuable for companies. Compliance teams now have a reliable source for external reporting, and business teams investing in new IT-based business models gain valuable information on how to integrate them sustainably. Most importantly, company management teams responsible for sustainability benefit because, with such solutions, they can work together to implement efficient measures to significantly reduce the company’s CO2 footprint. The data gained can also be used to create informed reports in line with the new EU Taxonomy Regulation.
For Application Performance Management and the reliable operation of modern IT, observability has become indispensable. And, in combination with solutions for calculating energy efficiency and CO2 footprints, the step toward sustainability and climate neutrality – Green IT – is no longer far away.
References
EU-Taxonomie-Verordnung: https://www.dihk.de/de/themen-und-positionen/wirtschaftspolitik/steuer-und-finanzpolitik/sustainable-finance-taxonomie-ein-dossier-fuer-die-betriebliche-praxis/eu-taxonomie-fuer-unternehmen-aller-groessen-relevant-66740
Green Deal: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_de
Studie Borderstep, Institut für Innovation und Nachhaltigkeit im Auftrag des Bitkom: Rechenzentren in Deutschland: Aktuelle Marktentwicklungen 2022; https://www.bitkom.org/Bitkom/Publikationen/Rechenzentren-in-Deutschland-2022
https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Lean-ICT-Report_The-Shift-Project_2019.pdf
https://www.mckinsey.com/de/news/presse/green-it-dekarbonisierung-unternehmens-it-studie
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