Welcome to Cority’s guide on ‘How to report GHG emissions from data centers and cloud services’. This guide is designed to help sustainability and ESG professionals accurately measure and report GHG emissions from data centers and cloud services.
This guide is designed to help sustainability and ESG professionals accurately measure and report GHG emissions from data centers and cloud services.
The world around us is constantly evolving and we currently find ourselves in a highly digitised age of streaming services, cryptocurrencies and internet traffic. Over the past decade, energy usage in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, including our increasing reliance on data centers, has grown exponentially.
Data centers use vast amounts of energy to function and as a result, contribute almost as much to global emissions as the airline industry. It is therefore important to understand how data centers function and what role they play as we work towards a more sustainable future.
A data center is a physical facility that businesses use to house their data, applications, and IT equipment. The design of a data center is based around a network of computing and storage resources and it often comprises several components including storage systems, servers, firewalls, and application delivery controllers.
Cloud services on the other hand are services that are available via remote cloud servers rather than an on-site server. They are hosted by third-party providers where the services are made available to users via the internet. The key difference between data centers and cloud services is operational control. Data centers allow lessees to have greater, or in the case of owned data centers, full control of the specification and management of the IT devices hosting the services.
This guide includes:
- Introduction to GHG emissions contribution
- What is a data center/cloud service?
- What are the GHG reporting boundaries for data centers?
- Allocating and calculating GHG emissions
- Sources