As organizations across industries increasingly adopt sustainability mandates, much of the onus is on chief information officers to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprints.
The most popular ways of doing so are by introducing renewable energy sources into existing systems and transitioning from proprietary data centers to public cloud services providers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Though the latter strategy does not entirely eliminate energy usage, since cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services still have to power their own data centers, many CIOs still reportedly see the new data-hosting setup as an overall decrease in their organizations' energy burdens. Additionally, many cloud providers are also complying with their own sustainability mandates: AWS has reportedly claimed its infrastructure is nearly four times more energy efficient as other enterprise data centers and that it generates millions of megawatt hours of renewable energy per year.
One IT leader seeking to decrease his organization's carbon footprint is Dick Daniels, executive vice president and CIO of Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente. Mr. Daniels told WSJ the health system and insurer has launched several initiatives to improve the energy efficiency of its data centers, including generating power for its data centers using wind and natural gas without combustion byproducts.