To enable organizations to clearly assess, benchmark, and demonstrate the sustainability credentials of their digital infrastructure to all of their stakeholders, whether their applications are deployed in enterprise-operated data centers or colocation facilities, or hosted by other third parties like hyperscalers or managed service providers (MSPs), Uptime Institute has launched its Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment.
Businesses that take on the Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment will be able to monitor and show progress over time, both internally and externally, and will have a clear understanding of their sustainability status and accomplishments to date across a wide range of independent and interdependent corporate functions and criteria.
While enabling participating businesses to be publicly acknowledged for their efforts in adhering to internationally recognized best practices for sustainable digital infrastructure, the Assessment’s findings may be utilized to make ongoing improvements in support of sustainability pledges.
The Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment examines and evaluates the actions that have been done and the advancements achieved in 14 major areas and more than 50 subcategories covering every facet of data center sustainability. This evaluation may be used to a whole dispersed hybrid IT estate or just one specific site.
Key areas span disciplines like IT Operations and Management, Facility Operations & Management, and cross-functional areas like clean energy and IT and facilities equipment procurement and corporate greenhouse gas reporting. They also include IT equipment, energy and water usage, carbon emissions and waste, including reuse and recycling of end-of-life equipment.
In addition to acknowledging that availability and resilience cannot be compromised, the evaluation scope would strike a unique balance in response to the worldwide need for more sustainable and efficient digital infrastructure.
“This assessment has been designed to help data center owner-operators and service provider communities build, deploy, benchmark, and manage impactful and practical sustainability programs that deliver tangible results, as with the unique and groundbreaking production of the Uptime Sustainability Executive Advisory report series in 2021 and the Accredited Sustainability Advisor education course first introduced in 2022,” said Ali Moinuddin, Chief Corporate Development Officer, Uptime Institute. “Organizations can use the Sustainability Assessment to determine which sustainability initiatives, without compromising the availability and resilience of their mission-critical digital infrastructure, can help reduce the environmental impact and operating expenses of their particular data center operating modality and deployment architecture.”
Environmental Footprint and Sustainability Strategies
The Uptime Institute claims that all businesses who operate or outsource digital infrastructure are facing a crucial moment with the launch of the Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment. Increased scrutiny of data centers’ individual and collective environmental footprint and sustainability strategies by regulators, legislators, customers, and investors alike has resulted in calls for much greater transparency, stated Uptime Institute. This increased visibility of the data center sector would partly be due to the significant growth in aggregate energy use and carbon emissions within the sector. There is a growing expectation for organizations to possess comprehensive knowledge of the environmental impact of their digital infrastructure, well-defined plans that address every aspect of data center sustainability, and well-defined initiatives for ongoing improvement, added Uptime Institute.
Many IT and data center operators are reportedly still in the early stages of this quickly changing and more difficult journey, according to recent and ongoing research conducted by Uptime Intelligence. In the most recent report from Uptime Intelligence titled ‘Sustainability strategies face greater pressure in 2024,’ only 23% of digital infrastructure operators track and report all three Scopes (1, 2, and 3) of carbon emissions, less than half of digital infrastructure operators (41%) track and report water usage, and only a quarter (26%) track IT waste or recycling.
The Uptime Institute examined more than 150 standards, rules, and regulations from across the globe, both planned and present, to make sure the Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment is thorough today and also accounts for future requirements. The international, multidisciplinary development team at Uptime collaborated with a highly skilled, representative group of more than twenty-two prestigious businesses and service providers that have built and run hundreds of data centers with a combined installed capacity of more than three gigawatts across 38 countries.
The Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment is applicable worldwide since it considers climate conditions, low-carbon energy and green resource availability, local and regional requirements, and these factors together set the standard for widely recognized best practices in digital infrastructure sustainability. The Assessment’s results have been crafted to ensure maximum consistency with globally recognized standards and both existing and future regulatory reporting obligations.
