Technology and data have never been more central to our lives, but this reliance has come at a cost.

During Commvault’s Climate Week event, “Data is the New Oil? And Other Thoughts”, moderator Bennett Richardson, VP and GM of Protocol, said this has created a paradox. On one hand, technological innovation has improved energy efficiency and made renewable energy sources possible. On the other hand, the business of collecting and managing data has a deep impact on the environment, and our creation of and need for data is only going to increase in the coming years.

Pandemic-driven sustainability is now a discussion that no industry or organization can escape “both due to environmental factors as well as business needs,” said Forrester Research analyst Abhijit Sunil. Sunil cited how global internet traffic itself grew tenfold from 2010 to 2020, and it is slated to be twice the size of what it is today by 2022.

Every activity performed online emits a few grams of carbon dioxide to run devices and power wireless networks. While that number might seem decidedly insignificant, that data lives on power-hungry servers that run around the clock in data centers that pump out an ever-increasing volume of carbon emissions.  

The overall carbon footprint of managing, storing, processing, and sharing that data around the world is growing exponentially. “70% of the data today is copies,” Commvault CMO Chris Powell said, during the Climate Week event. “As the data footprint grows, this is the opportunity for us to think differently as organizations.”

Sustainability initiatives often spawn innovation, Sunil said. For example, in speaking to several vendors that started sustainability projects and goals, those initiatives eventually ended up giving them top and bottom line growth and eventually became a product or service. “They could offer their customers the lessons that they learned, which could trickle down into other other services and projects that they could use and, therefore, add to their revenue streams,” he explained. 

However, attention has to be called to the problem before a solution can be put in place. According to Sunil, awareness is one of the first steps that organizations can take to define what is sustainable, what contributes to the company's carbon footprint, and how can that be effectively measured and communicated internally and externally. 

As industries become more data dependent, they're recognizing both the economic and environmental costs of leveraging their data to succeed in the digital age, Powell said. Commvault sees this as an opportunity to broaden the sustainability conversation, he added. Companies need to know what data they have, where it is, who has access to it, and the how many copies they have  — this is what Commvault refers to as ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial) — to understand the carbon footprint of their ROT data.

Sustainable innovation is going to be important for industries across all sectors as internal and partner sentiment is increasingly conscious about the impact companies have on the environment, Sunil said. He stressed “being a sustainable organization and talking about in an effective way translates into goodwill as well as actual green dollars.”

Sunil said this starts internally with data center operations and efficiency. And when it comes to disaster recovery, Powell said a lot of companies have historically established a second site in the event of an outage. However, that second site means “pretty much just doubling everything” in terms of cost, equipment, and heating and cooling needs.

“Sustainability is a North Star for cost reduction and innovation,” Sunil said in his closing remarks. “This will create excitement and energy around how to think sustainably, and how to be more responsible toward the environment — not just with employees, but also with your partners and customers.” 

"We're standing on the edge right now with regard to data, of it being both a great benefit for society, but also having a pretty big burden that we need to manage," Powell said.

So, Commvault formally joined the ranks of the Business Avengers Program, a coalition that brings together 17 global companies to deliver on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed to by every UN nation by 2030. Alongside global giants such as Coca-Cola, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, and Nike, each company in the avenger lineup champions one of the 17 goals to drive awareness and ultimately enforce change. Commvault has suited up to tackle SDG 12: responsible consumption and production.

SDG 12 targets include reducing waste, making procurement more sustainable, and strengthening scientific and technological capacities in developing countries to move toward more sustainable consumption and production. The sustainability transformation calls for more efficient data center operations that use less energy and water.