With a new year on the horizon, here are the top enterprise sustainability moves SDxCentral covered in 2022.

Cloud-native computing and green open source software boast the great potential to lower organizations’ environmental impacts. The next step on this path is integrating carbon emissions and other sustainability data within dashboards and metrics traditionally used to measure and optimize cloud costs, Arun Gupta, Intel VP and GM of open ecosystems, told SDxCentral.

“Once companies have invested in enabling CO2 data the same way they have enabled budget and cost data in their operations, they will want to have confidence that they can hit those targets,” Gupta said. This is where the green software principles come into play; its techniques at scale via open source can provide that confidence.

“For example, if you have a scheduled workload that has scheduling flexibility, you can take advantage of the Green Software Foundation’s carbon-aware API to help schedule that workload in the time or place with lower CO2 per kWh [kilowatt hour], also known as carbon intensity, to enable those reductions without significant changes to your application logic,” he explained.

As green software capabilities become increasingly embedded in enterprise operations, “the impact will grow,” Gupta argued.

Cybersecurity vendor Zscaler specializes in zero-trust security, but it’s also targeting net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025, the company announced in tandem with its claim of carbon neutrality for 2022.

Even as a cybersecurity company, which doesn’t seem like it would have much of an environmental impact, Zscaler said its enterprise customers are asking for increasingly more information on its environmental program and impacts – especially as the company grows and takes its carbon footprint up with it.

“It’s important for growth companies like Zscaler to understand and address their impacts now and build strong practices that will set the stage for deeper reductions,” a company spokesperson told SDxCentral.

Microsoft introduced an environmental credit service and updates to its Cloud for Sustainability that highlight the cloud provider’s focus on helping customers move past environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments to action, according to Rosie Mastrandrea, Microsoft’s senior director of sustainability.

“Data is the center of that, and it’s like – that’s a huge nut to crack. That’s the starting place for everybody,” she told SDxCentral, noting Microsoft’s focus on helping customers gather relevant data, measure accurately, and act on what they find.

A new avenue she's helping Microsoft explore is carbon credit markets with the launch of its Environmental Credit Service (ECS). These efforts are targeted at improving the trust and transparency of environmental credit markets by building a managed service on the backend side.

“For us, the backend is really being able to identify and work with project owners who want to be able to eventually sell their credits and then also bring[ing] in the verifiers and the registries and have it all in one system,” Mastrandrea explained, referencing the current lack of transparency and prevalence of double- or triple-counting in today’s carbon credit markets. “There’s just not a lot of transparency.”

Different tools already exist from major cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to calculate the carbon footprint of their customers’ cloud usage, but none quite measure up to the impact and functionality of Thoughtworks’ open source Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) tool, the software consultancy’s North American Head of Cleantech and Sustainability Lisa McNally told SDxCentral.

“I think using the AWS, Google, and Azure tool is great. It’s fantastic. Those tools are needed by the consumers of these cloud providers’ services, but the CCF tool is just kind of taking it, I think, one step further,” she said.

Her team built its cloud carbon footprint tool in an open source way because they wanted to rely on both the experts out in the community and those internally to “build out something that was really a differentiator … beyond what was already existing in the marketplace,” she explained.

Sesame Solar introduced mobile and renewable energy-powered nanogrids for use in providing electricity and powering critical network infrastructure in disaster scenarios like extreme weather events related to climate change.

The tech was originally designed to use solar power alone, but in locations receiving less sunlight “it was difficult for our solution to be as effective as it could be,” Sesame Solar CEO Lauren Flanagan explained in an email to SDxCentral.

The company’s newest iteration of its nanogrids use green hydrogen supplementally with solar power, allowing the pop-up energy systems to provide clean energy 24/7, Flanagan said, adding it can be set up and operational in 15 minutes. The term "green hydrogen," as opposed to "blue hydrogen," means the energy used to power electrolysis – which is the process of creating hydrogen gas by splitting water atoms – comes from renewable sources rather fossil fuels.