Microsoft has announced Cloud for Sustainability, an initiative that aims to help the company and its customers meet their carbon reduction and sustainability goals by recording, reporting, and reducing emissions on their path to net zero.
The new cloud offering, which will be available later this year, will allow customers to invest in sustainable practices and partner with experts to accelerate progress around their carbon reduction and sustainable goals.
“Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is designed to help companies measure, understand, and take charge of their carbon emissions, set sustainability goals and take measurable action,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at the company.
The company said the new offering acknowledges carbon reduction as one of the most urgent crises facing the planet, and responds to demand from investors, customers, and legislators for more commitment, accountability, and measurement of carbon reduction efforts within organisations.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is built on Azure, Microsoft Dataverse, Power Platform and Power BI. This new offering will employ the company’s ecosystem of partners for specialised industry third-party apps, data sources and emissions data connectors.
The platform includes SaaS offerings that can discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide accurate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals, and enable intelligent insights for organisations to take effective action.
For example, Microsoft said that CIOs will be able to easily report on IT carbon emissions from the cloud, devices, and applications as part of their department’s environmental footprint. From there, they will be able to connect their emissions data sources into one view for reporting.
Earlier this week, Google Cloud announced an update to its data centre region picker which allowed costumes to reduce their carbon footprint by selecting a region based on its CO2 output. Cloud Run and Datastream users can now find a region with the lowest carbon impact inside the Cloud Console location selectors. The tool is set to be rolled out to other Google Cloud offerings over time.