IBM introduced the integration of its Envizi Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Suite with IBM Turbonomic to offer CIOs close to real-time visibility of their data center and cloud-related environmental impacts.

CIOs are uniquely positioned to help organizations address and align business and sustainability goals because of the role data plays in reaching those targets. "The need to leverage data is paramount when ultimately making decisions related to their tech infrastructure," IBM Automation VP of Product Management Bill Lobig told SDxCentral.

Considering that need for data, CIOs should be embedding software into their tech stacks that identifies and accurately measures carbon emissions and energy use data associated with IT operations. With their level of visibility, CIOs have the opportunity to "act as influencers" and push leadership toward cohesive sustainability targets.

Lobig explained CIOs can lead energy use reductions in their organization by leading with action, setting sustainability performance standards and establishing a company-wide data architecture. These strategies "foster a climate where operationalizing sustainability is paramount and the long-term view of allocating resources toward sustainability is benevolent," he argued.

And if companies genuinely seek to fulfill their sustainability and ESG goals, the whole organization needs to "be mobilized across all levels, corporate and operational," Lobig said. "The CIO plays a vital role in ensuring that the technology they're employing will reduce energy demands and help meet the organization’s sustainability commitments."

The Envizi and Turbonomic integration provides visibility into data center energy demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for each individual application.

According to the vendor, this integration combines Turbonomic's workload optimization with IBM's Envizi suite of ESG data collection, analysis and reporting tools. This supports a timely and optimized view of data center resources, workload placement and "a single source of truth related to [ESG] data across the enterprise," Lobig said.

"We’re helping organizations gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the data that can ultimately help them make more sustainable decisions, across the entire organization," he added.

The incorporation of IBM Turbonomic into data center operations, distributed and multi-cloud environments helps enterprises consolidate workloads to optimize resources. Turbonomic automates the resizing, reconfiguring, moving and scaling of resources to use less physical infrastructure and reduce energy use while maintaining performance continuity. According to an IBM-commissioned Forrester report, Turbonomic's capabilities allow enterprises to significantly reduce data center opex and realize return-on-investment of 471% in six months.

Together, Turbonomic and Envizi improve organizations' accuracy of operational data reporting and feed that data to "an enterprise systems that tracks performance and helps the organization reduce their costs and overall carbon footprint," Lobig said.

"Organizations desire to partner with technology leaders who can provide end-to-end capabilities," he added.