Driving the Sustainability Agenda Through Modern Network Management

Organizations across Asia are feeling the heat — with increasing pressure to tackle the climate crisis and raise sustainability standards; technology leaders are assessing their business strategies to rewrite the playbook for sustainable business transformation. As it stands, the technology industry is responsible for up to 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions and the annual electronic waste generation is expected to reach 74.7 metric tons by 2030 and as much as 110 metric tons by 2050.

The region needs to accelerate action to achieve the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, and various companies are already taking progressive steps to make their business models sustainable. Findings from Bain show that 78% of global investors now place more emphasis on ESG than they did five years ago, demonstrating the growing importance of sustainability to investors.

The good news is companies are hearing this loud and clear. Singapore is leading the pack among Southeast Asian corporations, with 100% of businesses surveyed undertaking sustainability reporting in 2021, according to KPMG. While the rest of the region is expected to follow suit, organizations must ensure high-quality sustainability data is accessible for effective decision-making on their path toward the net zero transition.

This requires a concerted effort across the technology industry — from providers to end users — to address the environmental crisis. Consumers also increasingly support sustainable products, and CEOs are listening. According to Gartner, 83% of CEOs surveyed drive sustainability program activities directly impacting their organizations’ short- and long-term value.

Digital technologies today support the transition and adoption of more sustainable business assets as both an operational and reputational imperative. Managed networking solutions can pull those crucial sustainability levers, which organizations already acknowledge as a vital facilitator of financial flexibility and corporate agility. IDC predicts that in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), network-as-a-Service (NaaS) adoption will be pervasive and used by 30% of midsize to large businesses by 2025 to support operational agility and flexibility in their network management. This indicates that companies increasingly invest in managed service providers to ease network complexity in multicloud environments and improve resilience across their digital footprint.

Climate-conscious solutions

To achieve net zero emissions, enterprises must look beyond their operations' emissions and delve into their network suppliers' sustainability values. This insight into what enables effective IT operations to minimize environmental impacts over the product lifecycle leads to understanding the main sustainability attributes of how products are made, operated, and utilized.

A network management subscription model provides organizations with cutting-edge, sustainable networks that optimize energy usage by fusing their distinct customers’ insights with the vendor’s breadth and depth of product and solution knowledge. Modern network suppliers can deliver more sustainable IT to customers by applying Artificial Intelligence- and Machine Learning-based automation models to identify where the leaks are in your networks that are draining power on both the operational and human capital side.

Carefully considering the environmental impacts of networking throughout the IT supply chain should serve as the foundation for a solid and sustainable managed networking service solution. Certified sustainable vendors enable companies to ensure climate-conscious activities are ingrained at the very top of the supply chain by using a three-pronged approach to efficient IT — energy efficiency, equipment efficiency and resource efficiency.

Tapping into the circular economy

Another pathway toward effecting change is how organizations address their growing electronic waste stream. IT asset disposition (ITAD) services centered around reusing, recycling or disposing unwanted IT equipment with environmental safeguards are increasingly sought alongside today’s modern network offerings. In fact, 77% of businesses view ITAD assistance and e-waste services as an essential element of a network management offer, according to IDC.

In today’s volatile economy, organizations work around IT budget constraints while prioritizing digital transformation. Modern solutions offer asset decommissioning strategies to maximize technology lifecycles and sustainably reduce waste by upcycling and remarketing idle equipment to give functional assets a second life.

Organizations can add value by embracing circular technology service models to reduce the purchase of inessential hardware, power and resources and fund sustainability-focused innovations. Modern network management providers empower today’s enterprises to consolidate multiple functions on a single cloud platform that centrally configures equipment, simplifies IT workflows, and empowers workforce productivity.

Digging the data goldmine

Over time, new sustainability requirements will be added to the mix, and organizations will face more significant challenges to deliver more comprehensively on their sustainability reporting — this means companies need to access their data goldmine that accurately depicts their performance in tracking sustainability metrics. However, the current talent shortage adds pressure to strained IT teams expected to do more with fewer resources and meet the growing demands of digital transformation.

Over the next ten years, analysts anticipate that Southeast Asia alone will require USD2 trillion of investments to drive the sustainability agenda, presenting an opportunity to the region as global ESG assets could surpass USD53 trillion by 2025. However, the scarcity of high-quality data may deter investors from taking the leap. Modern network management models enable businesses to optimize their IT stacks to access key data about their energy use, carbon emissions, and end-of-life disposal to improve their sustainability credentials.

Conclusion

Asia is poised for a transition toward sustainability — making ESG top of mind for business leaders today. Organizations have a crucial role in bridging the gap between sustainable vendors and consumers looking to adopt sustainable IT.

A modern network offering should reassure customers that an environmental approach to networking is being taken across the entire IT supply chain. By viewing technology as a value-generating corporate asset rather than a tool, organizations can be nimbler in navigating the wave of challenges in attaining digital transformation in today’s dynamic economic landscape. A subscription-based model enables customers to harness sustainable network practices and optimize their IT stacks to create effective environmental offsets for a sustainable future.

Magic Hsu, director and general manager for Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong & Macau at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, wrote this article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/Olesia Bekh