SustainableIT.org, the nonprofit organisation focussed on advancing sustainability through technology leadership, has announced the release of standards for environmental, social and governance sustainability in IT.
SustainableIT is backed by executives from financial firms including Paribas, Morgan Stanley and Allstate, as well as technology vendors such as Delphix, the DevOps data management specialist. The new standards are designed to cover around 100 different impacts of IT, including metrics for data centre energy consumption, hybrid workforce enablement, cloud-hosted working, technology accessibility and inclusivity, sustainability training and AI bias reduction
Announcing its standards, SustainableIT.org said that i has calculated that the share of carbon emissions created by IT efforts has increased by 2.5x since 2007, and that the training of a single AI model emits as much carbon as five average cars over their total lifetime.
Among recent software testing initiatives designed to help firms benchmark ESG impacts; Paris-headquartered company CAST Software launched its Green Software Insights platform earlier this year. The platform analyses code repositories and identifies inefficiencies which cause excessive energy consumption and have scope for optimisation. CAST claims that this results in: “Lower energy expenditure and greenhouse gas emission with more economical, resilient, and efficient software.”
Meanwhile, at the QA Financial Forum New York in May, Aaron Jensen, senior manager solutions engineering and DevOps advisor at Delphix, outlined a case-study example in which a Delphix client had been able to generate additional development, testing and QA environments with the Delphix platform without the need for increased storage. The result was equivalent to a reduction of the requirement for cloud storage of 7296 Tb, which in turn equated to a carbon saving of 276 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
[Image Source: SustainableIT.org]