Microsoft's new cloud offering to help organizations achieve sustainability goals

The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is designed to help companies take control of their environmental initiatives, offering a set of comprehensive, integrated and automated insights for organizations to accelerate each stage of their sustainability journey.

At the Inspire 2021 conference, Microsoft announced a new offering - Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability - that will help companies measure, understand and take charge of their carbon emissions, set sustainability goals and take measurable action to reduce emissions.

According to the 2019 United Nations Global Compact - Accenture Strategy CEO Study on Sustainability, more than 90% of top CEOs cite sustainability as important or very important to the future success of their businesses.

Reducing carbon footprints and addressing environmental equity requires collective measures to understand and mitigate environmental impacts. However, measuring the overall environmental impact of an organization is particularly challenging.

The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is designed to help companies take control of their environmental initiatives, offering a set of comprehensive, integrated and automated insights for organizations to accelerate each stage of their sustainability journey. It includes Software as a Service (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
• enable intelligent insights for organizations to take more effective action

Using Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, organizations will be able to:

• easily report on IT carbon emissions from the cloud, devices and applications as part of their department's environmental footprint and then connect their emissions data sources into one view for reporting.
• offer their customers a sustainability scorecard to track progress against their carbon emission reduction goals.
• pinpoint specific emission areas and track if they are meeting their emission reduction goals.

In a nutshell, the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will allow organizations to more easily and effectively assess their environmental footprint, minimize impact and transform business while meeting the needs of the planet.

From digital supply chains that improve business processes and reduce carbon footprints to IoT sensors streaming real-time telemetry for predictive analytics, there is no shortage of examples of how technology can enable ambitious sustainability outcomes.

Microsoft EVP and chief commercial officer Judson Althoff