Measuring Your Cloud Storage’s Carbon Footprint Is Essential—and Easy

 According to a recent Bain and Company survey, only 24% of companies surveyed are ready for upcoming sustainability requirements.   

This concerning statistic highlights a significant risk for companies failing to proactively address regulatory requirements. The survey underscores widespread acknowledgment of the urgency surrounding sustainability initiatives, yet many organizations struggle with effective implementation due to cost constraints and regulatory complexities. For organizations globally, this gap between awareness and readiness brings the potential for fines and penalties as regulatory frameworks are continually established.  

The SEC's forthcoming climate disclosure ruling mandating disclosure of certain greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will bring this gap into the open. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitments, energy-efficient architecture design, and native tools for carbon footprint calculation will all be increasingly important to modern enterprises as they adapt to these new sustainability requirements. As a result, cloud service providers must deliver reliable tools, metrics, and programs to help customers better identify their contribution to carbon footprint.  

Understanding the CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) contribution of your organization’s cloud storage consumption is a difficult task. That is why it is important to understand what is being asked of you, now and in the future.  

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) establishes comprehensive global standardized frameworks to measure and manage greenhouse gas emissions from private and public sector operations, value chains, and mitigation actions.  Emissions are ranked by attribution to the end user by what is defined as “scopes,” which includes 1 ,2, and 3 rankings. 

• Scope 1: Fuels that are burned and utilized directly in the company, such as gas in company cars.  

• Scope 2: Indirectly generated emissions such as electricity for cooling and heating, which quite literally keep your lights on. 

• Scope 3: Any upstream or downstream investments throughout the value chain that put off emissions. This can include any finished goods your company consumes. 

If you find that the Scope 3 portion of the GHG protocol is vague, you are not alone. This is the catch-all category for all emissions, and it is burdensome to track resources against other items on a balance sheet. It is meant to include both upstream emissions from purchasing goods in the product development process as well as downstream emissions attributed to distributing the final product. As one can imagine, this is quite a vast and unpredictable form of accounting that has even the largest companies scratching their heads, unsure of how to proceed.  

Meeting sustainability challenges 

In 2024, sustainability initiatives should be top of mind for those in the most impactful roles in the IT space. The Wasabi 2024 Cloud Storage Index, an independent survey of 1,200 IT decision-makers worldwide, highlighted the trend that sustainability is not only top of mind, but just as imperative as other buying criteria like native data protection, including backup and immutability, when considering a cloud storage provider or service.  

For the second year, sustainability has been a higher priority than other factors such as price, performance, and scalability when considering a cloud storage provider. In fact, C-level respondents and those who are primarily "cloud-first" adopters ranked sustainability as their #1 criterion when considering a cloud storage provider.  

That is why Wasabi and Zero Circle have teamed up. Together we will promote a joint initiative to help others better understand sustainability in cloud storage.

Using Carbon Circle, an invoice-based carbon footprint solution from Zero Circle, Wasabi customers are armed with the transparency they require to establish a real-time, honest assessment of their carbon footprint. This will educate users of Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage on their cloud storage invoice, a key part of scope 3 carbon emissions. When added to the accounting of an organization’s downstream environmental impact, this carbon footprint estimation can assist in establishing a more sustainable future for generations to come.  

This impactful tool will be on full display in a vibrant roundtable discussion on July 16 as the team at Wasabi and Zero Circle are joined by 451 Research’s Henry Balthazar to share practical industry knowledge on: 

• How organizations can lower the environmental impact of IT 

• How to derive competitive advantages in an eco-conscious marketplace 

• Tools to measurable IT strategy that achieves tangible results 

Wasabi adoption of Zero Circle's carbon footprint solution is a testament to its commitment to support customer sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. The solution's unique features and flexibility make it a powerful resource for companies seeking to enhance their cloud sustainability metrics and measurements. 

"Collaborating with Zero Circle aligns with our commitment to delivering high-quality, sustainable cloud storage solutions for our partners and customers," said David Boland, Vice President of Cloud Strategy at Wasabi. "Zero Circle's innovative approach to carbon footprint calculation illustrates our environmental impact. Understanding Scope 3 carbon footprints benefits everyone."  

Protecting the future 

Nothing is more important to the future of international business and the success of the world we know today than the health of the environment we all share.  Even though local regulations to disclose GHG emissions and other climate-related risks may still be in development, mandates are not going away anytime soon and are only going to speed up. Making sustainability a key tenet in an organization's strategy could provide a competitive boost if you can leverage a transparent and accurate representation of the CO2e your company emits in the normal course of operation.  

Take the initiative and uncover the true cost of your cloud storage carbon footprint by uploading your invoice now!