The Challenge

Showing tangible progress toward net zero from cloud migration.

As an integrated oil company (IOC), our client's efforts toward meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are very public. Demonstrating tangible progress toward their ambition of becoming net zero by 2050 is vital to their future success.

While the successful cloud migrations lessened their impact on our planet, it was difficult to report on the true sustainability effect or measure their carbon profile. They reached out for support to harness specialized reporting skills to improve their ability to lower their digital carbon emissions.

The Solution

Providing structure, objectives, and tech expertise to navigate uncharted territory.

Credera was appointed to help navigate uncharted territory in setting up structures for digital carbon tracking and enable progress against the following objectives:

• Establish a digital carbon framework baselined with inflight low carbon initiatives.

• Set the annual priorities to align with the wider sustainability framework.

• Track and measure consumption and carbon capture to identify sustainability opportunities that further lowers carbon footprint.

• Promote sustainability within other areas of the business and their business partners to assist lowering carbon emissions for the greater good of our environment.

In collaboration with their digital sustainability lead, we identified several key milestones across 2021 to break down the objectives set at program level, including refreshing the carbon baseline, regional data center migrations site selection, renewable power partner plan, improve circularity measurement, and issue quarterly reports.

The interactive heatmap we produced of their regional data centers influenced prioritization of global data center transformations. We ranked each of their more than 130 remaining data centers’ carbon emissions as high, medium, or low.

Program management of cloud migrations on this scale takes a myriad of technical and commercial inputs, but the data centers with the highest carbon emissions can now be identified and tracked as a visible metric at board level.

For digital sustainability reporting, we managed multiple dashboards, enabling tracking of server emissions and the full lifecycle of IT materials. We improved data accessibility through monthly reporting and creation of self-serve tools enabling carbon profile review. Our dashboards proved popular with our client stakeholders and set a precedent for reporting.

The Results

Achieving a 50% reduction in digital carbon profile.

Digital sustainability reporting is set up and live on all key metrics of their digital estate (using Power BI). This helped reduce their digital carbon profile by 50% in the last year.

High levels of automation allow them to manage sustainability reports amid business-as-usual operations. Sustainability metrics are now a core component in management’s decision-making.

Our client has full visibility of the improving carbon footprint of their cloud migration program by tracking transformation of sites, servers, and emission savings. That means platform owners can see the carbon emissions estimates for the services they are responsible for, making it a key metric they can access and track.

IT can clearly demonstrate that on-premises emissions are substantially higher than estimated cloud and workplace emissions combined. This brings further support to their global cloud transformation program and fuels momentum for continued investment.