As the deadline to meet net-zero emissions targets set for 2030 and 2050 approaches for organisations, the time to reduce emissions is now.
With new technologies being introduced daily, it's becoming increasingly challenging to control waste and energy consumption, especially in the digital IT sphere. Often, organizations don't realize that carbon emissions are emitted from intangible sources too.
McKinsey & Company’s analysis suggested that starting now to increase the sustainability of software and data could lower CO2 emissions by approximately 5% by 2030.
This article tells you everything you need to know about the best sustainable software solutions and organisations leading in the sustainable IT space.
What is Sustainable Software?
Sustainable software is an eco-friendly software designed to reduce the environmental impact of computing throughout its lifecycle. Sustainable software strives to reduce energy consumption, optimise resources efficiently and promote responsible use in alignment with net zero emission goals.
Companies develop such eco-friendly software with the aim of reducing the carbon footprint linked to software development and deployment. This is still an emerging field where the environmental impact of intangible technology is being acknowledged.
Embracing sustainable practices and principles in software development can help organisations contribute to net zero emissions goals worldwide. Additionally, it can also help them reduce costs, improve efficiency and boost organisational reputation.
Read: Circular Economy Could Tackle Big Tech Gen-AI E-Waste
What is Sustainable Software Engineering?
Sustainable software engineering centres on the design application of software that also reduces that negative impact on the environment.
Also known as green software, scientists engineer the architecture of such software considering the best hardware and data centre design that will minimally impact climate change.
It's about making software more energy-efficient, resource-conscious, and sustainable throughout its entire lifecycle.
According to Microsoft, Sustainable Software Engineering's principles and philosophies are a core set of competencies that are necessary to define, build, and run sustainable software applications.
By synthesizing this knowledge, a Sustainable Software Engineer (SSE) can make decisions that have a meaningful impact on the carbon pollution of their applications.
How Does a Sustainable Software Work?
Sustainable software functions by prioritising energy efficiency and resource allocation which is well optimised throughout its lifecycle. For instance, a developer could write a structured code that doesn’t require too many computations and data transfers.
Extensive computations and data transfers use an immense amount of energy. However, sustainable software could help the developer use energy-efficient hardware and data centres while leveraging cloud computing to optimise resource allocation.
Such an effort not only minimises the environmental impact but also enables organisations to allocate resources efficiently without much waste. Additionally, sustainable software is designed for longevity and easy maintenance, reducing the need for frequent updates and replacements.
By adopting these practices, sustainable software minimises its carbon footprint, reduces energy consumption, and promotes responsible resource usage, contributing to a more environmentally friendly digital landscape.
Read: How AI Growth is Impacting Data Centre Demand
Key Features of Sustainable Software
1. Carbon Footprint
Sustainable software developers aim to design the solution in a way that minimises the carbon footprint throughout its lifecycle including development to disposal. This includes considering factors such as energy consumption, resource utilisation, and the generation of electronic waste.
An organisation using sustainable software prioritises energy efficiency, optimising resource usage, and selecting sustainable infrastructure to help developers significantly reduce the carbon footprint of their software solutions.
2. Electricity
Sustainable software is designed with the intention to reduce the electricity consumption associated with its development, deployment and execution.
Developers design the interface to optimise algorithms and data structures that also reduce computational complexity, and minimise network traffic and data transfers. As a result, these steps reduce computational complexities, minimise network traffic and data transfers, and use energy-efficient hardware and infrastructure.
Writing efficient code develops also deploy energy-saving techniques so sustainable software can drastically reduce its electricity consumption, ultimately lowering carbon emissions and reducing operational costs.
3. Carbon Awareness
Sustainable software prompts developers to be aware of techniques that reduce the carbon footprint, especially considering electricity consumption that is the least carbon-intensive. Organisations and developers should have a critical understanding of the environmental impact linked to a software’s entire lifecycle.
This includes assessing the carbon footprint of development tools, infrastructure, and energy consumption during software execution. By tracking and analysing carbon emissions, developers can identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions to minimise their environmental impact.
This awareness empowers developers to choose energy-efficient hardware, optimise code for performance, and leverage sustainable cloud services.
4. Hardware
Sustainable software development also involves selecting hardware components with minimal environmental impact throughout its lifecycle. The hardware should be chosen to ensure that it’s long-lasting and functioning efficiently throughout its lifecycle for instance.
The components of such an item should be energy efficient such as the processors, storage devices, and networking equipment, that consume less power and generate less heat.
Additionally, when hardware utilisation is paired with consolidating servers and virtualising resources on the software platform sustainably, it can significantly reduce energy consumption and hardware footprint. Such hardware efficiency and responsible disposal practices allow sustainable software to contribute to a more sustainable digital infrastructure.
5. Measurement
Sustainable software developed by organisations must measure their total carbon emission index to ensure the effectiveness of the software deployment.
Tools like the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol can be used to measure the carbon emissions of an organisation. The GHG protocol tool not only calculates the total emissions of the organisation but also helps them find the source of the emissions.
Organisations can also deploy a Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) calculation method that estimates the carbon emissions linked to all types of software applications.
According to Microsoft, it provides a consistent approach to describing software emissions and how changes can make a difference. The SCI tool considers components like energy, location-based carbon intensity, and embodied carbon to calculate the emission score.
6. Energy Consumption
Sustainable software is designed in a way that makes them mindful of energy consumption. It takes responsibility for the amount of energy it uses and aims to use as little of it as possible.
Their consumption is dependent on the hardware electricity consumption usually referred to as power usage efficiency (PUE) in the cloud space. To ensure the software is running sustainably, the hardware too needs to be energy efficient. This is because when using a computer (hardware) to conduct a series of mathematical calculations, for instance, users have to optimise the hardware for software. The computer converts electricity to practical computing operations.
Green Software Practitioner proposes to improve hardware efficiency by running the workload on as few servers as possible with the servers running at the highest utilisation rate, maximising energy efficiency.
Best Sustainable Software Solution Companies
Workiva
The Workiva Platform developed by Workiva Inc., a global software-as-a-service company offers a solution for financial reporting, ESG reporting, audit and risk management.
While the company doesn’t market itself as a ‘sustainable software company,’ it actively promotes sustainable practices for business organisations through its user-friendly drag-and-drop capabilities.
The platform combines data integrity and collaboration with control tools to help teams in an organisation report on hundreds of data metrics and risks. Through its advanced capabilities including AI, the platform provides teams with data clarity and accuracy and increases efficiency and results. This is assured integrated reporting in action.
Sustainability teams can use the same data and collect their own to dynamically adjust their disclosures. Additionally, risk and compliance are given the visibility they need.
Diligent
Diligent is a leading modern governance, risk and compliance (GRC) SaaS company providing solutions to over a million users with at least 25,000 customers worldwide. The firm provides a platform for centralised ESG and sustainability programs which helps organisations turn their ESG goals into measurable outcomes.
Organisations can leverage a single platform to collect, collaborate and measure their ESG data to produce reports immediately. Diligent believes that it can help organisations save up to 27% of total ESG net costs by reducing audit spend by 50% with automation that saves hundreds of hours of work each year.
The platform has been equipped with capabilities that automatically account for the carbon footprint of an organisation. The platform automatically collates relevant data and generates over 80 pre-configured audit-ready reports to provide consistency in sustainability reporting.
Plan A
Plan A, a sustainability management platform offers corporate carbon accounting and decarbonisation software to help organisations reach their net zero goals. The company has been certified by TÜV Rheinland, GHG Protocol compliant.
The company’s end-to-end solution equips an organisation with the capabilities to extract carbon data and measure its carbon footprint on the platform. It also provides science-backed targets and helps them get CSRD-ready.
Overall, the solution creates a detailed decarbonisation plan to help a corporation reduce its emissions and optimise resources efficiently. All of the capabilities are unified on a single platform, eradicating the hassle of resorting to different solutions.
Some of their clients include – Chloe, N26, BNP Paribas, Apax Partners, Dawn Capital, Sorare, BMW, Trivago, Deutsche Bank, Mollie, Payhawk, and the European Union. Plan A is also a global exclusive partner of Visa.
Plan A is also certified by both SBTI and B-Corporation which means it strictly adheres to social and environmental standards.
Greenly
Greenly is another B-corp-certified software development company specialising in solutions for climate-conscious companies aiming to achieve net zero emissions.
Greenly offers a carbon accounting platform equipped with a climate suite including carbon assessment, decarbonisation strategy, CSRD compliance, SBTi support, life cycle assessment and many other sustainability tracking tools.
It offers a comprehensive solution that aims to provide clarity and actionable insights into greenhouse gas and life cycle assessments to organisations. Greenly combines sectoral expertise and compliance to help organisations achieve their environmental goals, align with SBTi guidelines, and model carbon emissions and cost scenarios.
PersefoniAI
PersefoniAI is emerging as a leading climate management and accounting platform (CMAP) for real-time management, analytics and disclosure. The firm offers SaaS solutions to help enterprises and financial institutions meet the necessary stakeholder and regulatory climate disclosure requirements.
Through its platform, it provides organisations with carbon insights on a unified source with the aim of helping them minimise energy consumption and reduce emissions. It converts data into actionable insights to help enterprises lower their carbon footprint.
The company has been built on PersefoniAI’s own large language model (LLM) offering organisations with on-demand technical carbon accounting support.
Additionally, PersefoniAI’s natural language-based emissions factor matching has the capability to map out a variety of data sources to the appropriate LCA and commodities emission factors.
PersefoniAI essentially uses AI to automatically spot opportunities to reduce emissions for quality control as well as to meet regulatory requirements.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an IT service and consulting firm that offers low-carbon solutions and advanced analytics. These are aimed at minimising energy consumption and carbon footprint across the IT industry while still optimising resources and visibility.
Through its HPE GreenLake platform, the company helps organisations bring the cloud to their data centres and colocations. It provides visibility and elasticity to meet demand without overprovisioning.
According to the firm customers realise 53% lower infrastructure energy consumption and require 36% fewer servers for equivalent workloads.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers HPE GreenLake for computing ops management where it easily monitors, manages, and gains visible insights into an organisation’s distributed computing environment.
It provides a unified console that helps organisations secure cloud-like agility across distributed compute infrastructure and agile life cycle management. This not only makes operations faster and more efficient but also saves costs while scaling flexibly.
Organisations can also explore the HPE Sustainability Insight Center which provides visibility and sustainability management.
This helps organisations make impactful decisions to lower costs and achieve sustainable IT goals through the platform’s capabilities. The capabilities include supporting heterogeneous IT environments, unified dashboards and reporting among many others.
Zartis
Zartis is a software service provider and Deloitte Fast50 company that specialises in developing digital IT solutions that are also sustainable. They are especially skilled in the areas of Javascript/Typescript (Angular, React, Vue, Node.js), .NET, Java, Python, Scala, Ruby, Go, and cloud-based architectures like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
The company combines team augmentation, technology consulting, domain expertise, and innovation to help an organisation achieve sustainable and yet high-functioning software.
Zartis believes in modernising an organisation’s systems through speed in software while still sustainably achieving scalability.
It begins by analysing an organisation’s existing software architecture and identifying current capabilities, limitations, and areas for improvement. Following this, the firm’s expats design a plan that aligns with the organisation’s long-term objectives, emphasising scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency.
When the plan is in hand, Zartis works closely with its clients to help them execute the roadmap laid out to ensure a seamless transition supported by expert guidance and technical oversight.
Syngenio AG
Syngenio AG is an independent IT service and consulting company specialising in digital payment, next-generation banking and green enterprise IT. It provides and executes IT solutions through a targeted interaction of software development.
The company aims to devise effective sustainable and secure software that optimally supports organisations and their business models.
Syngenio’s consultants develop value-added solutions including application development. They particularly consider Green Software Design (GSD) which deals with the analysis and optimisation of software.
In addition to providing tailored sustainable software solutions, Syngenio also supports organisations with implementation with ongoing operations via managed services.
This also includes planning, full-stack development using GSD, integrating cyber security, usage models via cloud-native or on-premise, DevOps and agile development.
UKAD
UKAD is a software development company that helps organisations scale software development for a wide variety of industries with use cases in IT consulting, e-commerce, retail, healthcare, education, and finance.
UKAD approaches software development through a combination of practical steps like minimising paper use, water, and electricity but also sustainable software design and development.
The firm’s development team avoids excessive code and unnecessary features to reduce computational overhead and resource consumption.
The company optimises algorithms and data structures to minimise energy use in addition to optimising cloud technologies mindfully. They allocate computing facilities in areas equipped with greener energy solutions to help organisations further reduce their carbon footprint.
The firm also widely uses Microsoft.NET and Azure technology stack due to Microsfot’s sustainability policy and goals. Microsoft aims to become a carbon-negative company by 2030.
IBM
IBM, short for International Business Machines Corporation, one of the world's leading technology companies, also offers specialised sustainable software solutions to help enterprises reduce their carbon footprint.
IBM provides an end-to-end sustainability consulting service to embed sustainability solutions into an enterprise’s operations and culture.
It created a sustainability agenda and pathways followed by holistic reporting and driving sustainability goals against ESG indicators to manage compliance and minimise risk.
The tech giant also leverages AI to identify waste and improve energy and operating efficiency. Most importantly, it encourages organisations to integrate sustainability in IT for responsible computing. IBM proposes hybrid cloud computing systems which expands opportunities for sustainable IT strategies.
Hybrid cloud strategies can help organisations sustainably manage data, workloads, and applications which ultimately reduces the energy consumption across the organisation.
