Green clouds: the sustainability of digital platforms
As the global economy has moved to digital platforms and the cloud, energy consumption has become less tangible and less visible—but it certainly hasn't disappeared. Data center electricity usage has tripled in the last decade, and with AI now transforming industries worldwide, we're facing an unprecedented 165% increase in data center power demand over the next five years, including a 50% surge in just 2026 and 2027 alone.
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This surge demands increasing amounts of precious resources – primarily power and water for cooling. Data centers and networks already consume 3,5% of all EU electricity, with hotspots like the Netherlands at 6% and Ireland at a staggering 19%. And this doesn't even include the frequently overlooked energy consumption of billions of client devices – smartphones, laptops, and IoT devices that actually interact with these platforms. Often, these client devices are significantly less energy efficient than modern digital server infrastructure in the cloud.
"Data centers and networks already consume 3,5% of all EU electricity, with hotspots like the Netherlands at 6%."
Digital platforms and their sustainability
To manage this staggering growth sustainably, digital platforms now face mounting pressure to measure and reduce their environmental impact – whether driven by rising energy costs, incoming EU regulations, or growing stakeholder expectations.
But where exactly does this environmental impact come from? Digital platforms consume energy across multiple layers. Server infrastructure processes user requests, stores data, and runs applications around the clock. Every interaction - from loading a webpage to streaming a video - triggers data transmission across energy-intensive networks and storage systems. AI features, when present, amplify these demands significantly: a single ChatGPT query consumes roughly 10 times more energy than a classic Google search. Meanwhile, millions of user devices constantly sync, update, and communicate with these platforms, creating a distributed energy footprint that's largely invisible to platform operators.
"A single ChatGPT query consumes roughly 10 times more energy than a classic Google search."
The current state of measuring impact
Understanding this impact requires proper monitoring – but that's easier said than done. Cloud platforms attempt to provide insights through the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Corporate Standard, which categorizes emissions into three scopes:
Scope 1: Direct emissions from owned sources. E.g. diesel for generators
Scope 2: Indirect emissions from purchased electricity, heating, cooling, etc. E.g. using servers
Scope 3: All other indirect emissions in the value chain. E.g. manufacturing servers
However, this standard has significant limitations. Assessments aren't directly comparable between companies due to different methodologies. Major cloud providers handle reporting inconsistently – AWS doesn't calculate Scope 3 emissions per account or customer (probably because this is very hard to do right) while Azure does (or at least tries to), leaving customers blind to often the largest emission category.
For client devices and distributed components, comprehensive monitoring standards barely exist at all.
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From monitoring to reduction
While monitoring provides essential insights, organizations ultimately need to take action to reduce their impact. Several proven strategies can make a significant difference: relocating workloads to more efficient data center regions or scheduling them during low-carbon energy periods; rightsizing infrastructure to match actual needs rather than over-provisioning; optimizing how static assets are delivered to users; hardware-accelerated crypto and AI-workloads and leveraging modern protocols that reduce data transmission overhead.
"Scheduling workloads during low-carbon energy periods is a way to reduce impact that can be part of a mix of optimizations."
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However, knowing these strategies exist and implementing them effectively are two different challenges. Most organizations struggle to translate monitoring data into specific, actionable improvements. Generic best practices rarely account for unique application architectures, user patterns, or business constraints. Only recently has Azure begun offering tailored optimization recommendations, highlighting just how underserved this space remains.
From insight to actionable impact
At iO, we developed the Digital Platform Sustainability Tool (DPST) to bridge the gap between sustainability monitoring and actionable optimization. As a leading digital agency, we are continuously exploring methods to enhance the sustainability of our clients and ourselves, transitioning from green efforts to green excellence. Our tool provides specific, tailored actionables for your digital platforms, surpassing generic recommendations. DPST underlines our data-driven approach, offering deep insights and supporting long-term sustainability goals.
Unlike existing solutions that focus primarily on cloud infrastructure, a scan with iO’s DPST provides a comprehensive view across your entire digital ecosystem - from server efficiency to client device optimization.
A scan with DPST begins with a secure, minimal-access connection to your platform, ensuring your data remains protected throughout the process. The scanning methodology adapts intelligently to the different domains within the digital ecosystem - recognizing that domains as cloud infrastructure and client devices each require specialized analysis techniques. By collecting and analyzing tens of thousands of metric points across these varied environments, DPST delivers actionable insights that are both comprehensive and tailored to your digital platform.
This enables organizations to make informed decisions that actually reduce their environmental footprint (compared to just a bit of greenwashing) while also cutting operational costs. But we don't stop at insights - we work directly with your organization to efficiently implement these optimizations, ensuring recommendations translate into measurable impact in days instead of years.
"A scan with iO’s DPST provides a comprehensive view across your entire digital ecosystem - from server efficiency and types of workload, to client device optimization."
Your platform impact, made visible and reduced
Ready to not just understand your platform's environmental impact, but to actively reduce it? Contact us to see how iO and DPST can help your organization to optimize both sustainability and cost of your digital platform. With experts in the fields of AWS, Azure and Container workloads and equal focus on client-side insights, transformation to a greener digital future is near.
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