Accelerating Sustainability:
How Insight and Microsoft
Fast-Track Your Net-Zero Goals
Organizations across the globe face increasing regulations and the growing challenge of offsetting carbon emissions. Carving a path to net-zero emissions — where organizations remove as much carbon as they emit — may not be as smooth as it could be.
Insight and Microsoft are here to help. Our collective goal is to help organizations forge a frictionless path to a greener future through the power of innovation.
Just last year, Insight became the first partner to act on Microsoft’s Cloud for Sustainability program. This platform was the first horizontal cloud designed to work across multiple industries and radically transform how organizations perceive and pursue their sustainability goals.
As Principal Architect of Solutions at Insight Canada, I am proud and excited to share Microsoft’s evolving Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) capabilities within the Microsoft Cloud portfolio.
In this article, you will learn how to harness the progress Insight and Microsoft have made to support your sustainability journey across four key areas:
Unifying data intelligence
Building a sustainable IT infrastructure
Reducing operational environmental impacts
Creating sustainable value chains
By unlocking the power of Microsoft’s advancements with Insight’s expertise in these four areas, your organization can accelerate your sustainability journey and help us reach our collective destination of a net zero world faster.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is transforming the way organizations perceive and pursue their sustainability goals.
The more progress organizations make in their sustainability journey, the more obstacles they can face. Getting a unified view of their sustainability data is perhaps the biggest among them.
The solution is to turn all the data coming in into actionable intelligence.
That’s where Microsoft Sustainability Manager steps in. This Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution offers a unified platform that enables your organization to seamlessly input, extract and interpret your data.
A major advantage of having Microsoft Sustainability Manager on your side is how it centralizes emissions-related data. This alone streamlines the process of data ingestion, sharing and reporting.
Prebuilt calculation models deliver instant insights into your carbon footprint and environmental impact. These models are adjustable and can be tailored to fit your unique business requirements and the sustainability goals of your customers.
Easy interpretation of data lies at the heart of any successful approach to sustainability. Microsoft presents a unified platform for data integration that boasts a simple calculation experience with robust connectors to key partner applications that are available at Microsoft AppSource.
By laying a firm foundation with unified data, Insight and Microsoft take the complexity out of building a resilient and greener IT infrastructure, which just so happens to be the next critical step in your sustainability journey.
Here’s a question I get asked a lot: “What step can I take right now to build a sustainable IT infrastructure?”
The answer is migrating workloads to the cloud and replacing outdated systems with energy efficient alternatives.
This move alone can dramatically reduce carbon and energy emissions. Research has shown that migrating to Microsoft Azure can make your operations up to 98% more carbon efficient than on-premises options. There is more good news. Microsoft’s renewable energy purchases have made Azure up to 93% more energy-efficient than on-premises servers. The result is a greener cloud that is generating significant cost savings for Azure customers.The Azure Migration and Modernization Program — backed by System and Solution Integrator partners — evolves your cloud workload migration into a key investment strategy that yields implementable sustainability benefits. Turning these benefits into tangible outcomes is where the Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard (EID) comes into play.
The EID enhances Insight and Microsoft’s commitment to transparency by enabling organizations to reliably measure the sustainability impact of migrating to the cloud. This happens with independently verified emissions data from Azure usage (covering scopes one, two and three).
Another benefit of EID — now available for Microsoft 365 — is comprehensive visibility. Organizations gain a clear picture of the emissions they are offsetting by migrating priority workloads to the cloud.
By providing transparent insights, EID brings clarity to the sustainability impacts of your IT decisions. With resources from Microsoft and Insight’s expertise in Microsoft Azure, we can further crystallize your focus on sustainability with operational changes that bring the goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions within reach.
Organizations making serious progress toward sustainability are scrutinizing, remediating and replacing processes that have high environmental impacts. This involves reducing the environmental imprint of buildings, spaces and equipment through smart facilities management.
Insight prioritizes solutions that lower energy consumption, create smart facilities, and promote collaboration and planning tools. Yet buildings remain significant contributors to the global climate crisis.
That’s why companies like Johnson Controls, Inc. (JCI), a global leader in creating smart building and energy solutions, are radically shifting the way buildings are managed.
JCI’s OpenBlue Enterprise Manager is a comprehensive suite of solutions designed to promote sustainability, enhance operational efficiency and cultivate healthier environments.
Enterprise Manager offers a suite of capabilities, all accessible from a single dashboard. Organizations can monitor, analyze and optimize various sustainability metrics — from energy usage and assessment management to spatial planning and occupant comfort — to improve their ESG scores without compromising other business priorities.
George Oliver, Chief Executive Officer of Johnson Controls, emphasizes the integrative power of Microsoft’s solutions: “Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability advance our capabilities to create solutions that enable greater customer experiences and outcomes,” Oliver says. “[This leads to] increased safety, health and sustainability worldwide — a win for our customers, our businesses and our planet.”
Recognizing the critical role of operational changes, Insight, in partnership with Microsoft, leverages the innovations from companies like Johnson Controls to reduce operational carbon footprints. We also help ensure sustainability in another critical area — the supply chain.
“Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability [is] … a win for our customers, our businesses and our planet.”
Meeting sustainability goals requires transparency across the entire value chain. Such transparency requires that upstream and downstream data is reliable. EcoVadis — with sustainability ratings for 95,000 companies across more than 160 countries and 200 industries — is a pivotal source of such data.
By integrating EcoVadis’ data into the analytics and reporting experiences within Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft and Insight are empowering organizations to make informed decisions about their supplier selection based on EcoVadis’ ESG ratings, emissions values and revenue intensity scores.
Pierre-François Thaler, Co-CEO of EcoVadis, speaks about the importance of incorporating an actionable data source within Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
“Our sustainability ratings, in combination with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, empower businesses with essential insights for decision-making.” The result, as Thaler explains, embodies Insight and Microsoft’s joint mission: “fueling innovation and driving sustainability impact at global scale.”In addition to enhancing transparency in supply chains and elevating decision-making for businesses worldwide, Insight and Microsoft also ensure the deployment of solutions align with your organization — no matter what stage of your sustainability journey you are currently in.
“Our sustainability ratings, in combination with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, empower businesses with essential insights for decision-making.”
We believe the most powerful tool in combating climate change is innovation. When combined with the right resources and expertise, innovation can help organizations like yours make measurably meaningful progress toward net-zero emissions. By offering solutions in data intelligence, IT infrastructure, operational changes, and supply chain, Insight and Microsoft are equipping organizations with means to turn the aspiration of sustainability into an achievable end.
Our joint mission is to align the broader environment with your business objectives. You can transition to a net-zero world, all while saving money, becoming more resilient and creating sustainable value for your stakeholders.
Easy adoption, tailored solutions and continual improvement for organizations in their quest for sustainability — that is the promise of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability combined with the power of Insight. We meet you where you are in your sustainability journey, and we show you how to take the path of least resistance and most profitable outcomes.
Our goal may be ambitious, but it’s also simple: Empowering organizations like yours to achieve more — for your business, for the environment and for future generations. Together, we can shape a sustainable future and fast-track the goal of reaching a net-zero world.
Accelerate your sustainability journey. Transform your sustainability vision into innovative reality with Insight and Microsoft Azure solutions.
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