The Green Behind the Cloud

Not all migrations to the cloud are equally successful. Accenture explains how to maximise the benefit to both profits and the planet.

1) Select with purpose - Cloud providers set different corporate commitments towards sustainability, which in turn determine how they plan, build, power, operate, and retire their data centres.

2) Build with ambition - The journey toward a sustainable cloud involves three ambition levels: infrastructure as a service migrations without major redesign (bronze level), application of sustainable software engineering practices (silver level), and application optimisation for the “fabric of the cloud” (gold level).

3) Innovate further - Leading companies are pushing further when it comes to innovation and going beyond data centre carbon improvements. Accenture estimates show enterprise technology manufacturers can capture an additional 16 percent of operating profit by designing products for longevity, modularity, and circularity.