Sustainability has become a priority to customers, regulators, employees, and corporates, making it an urgent issue for enterprises to act upon. Gartner research has predicted that 85% of global enterprises will adopt a cloud-first digital strategy by 2025.

The next decade of business change will be defined by the sustainability transition, not only addressing regulatory needs but also acting as a business differentiator. The companies leveraging it – we call them Twin Transformers – are more likely to be among tomorrow’s strongest-performing businesses. There are three main ways AWS collaborates with customers on their sustainable journey:

Migrate

Identifying and moving workloads to the cloud reduces your carbon footprint compared to managing on-premises data centers. According to 451 Research, AWS can lower customers’ carbon footprint by nearly 80% compared to other surveyed enterprise data centers. This number will increase to 96% once AWS is powered by 100% renewable energy, which AWS is on the path to reach by 2025.

The energy savings result from the higher energy efficiency of our servers and data center facilities. This includes operating servers at a higher utilization rate and designing facilities to reduce energy and water consumption. By contrast, enterprise infrastructure tends to be fragmented across disciplines (including server, storage, networks, facilities management, and real estate), with efficiency initiatives that are narrower in focus and harder to scale.

One example of how AWS builds hardware with sustainability in mind is Graviton3, which is our third-generation ARM-based processor. Graviton3-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances use up to 60% less energy for the same performance than comparable Amazon EC2 instances. With the world’s increase in demand for compute and machine learning becoming more pervasive, continually innovating at the chip level is critical to ensuring that we can sustainably power the workloads of the future, so we are continually improving the power efficiency.

Optimize

For newly moved and existing cloud workloads focus on optimizing those workloads. With our new Well-Architected for Sustainability pillar, you can further reduce your carbon footprint through best practices that optimize workloads for sustainability and further conservation of energy.

To assist customers with their own reporting, AWS provides customers with carbon footprint tools that help them understand the carbon footprint of their workloads running on AWS, measure against optimization, and know the carbon emissions associated with their use of AWS. The benefits of the tools include calculating carbon footprint estimates, trend analysis, and forecasting future emissions, which customers can use to assess the impact of their emissions as their usage evolves and as AWS meets its goal to of being powered by 100% renewable energy, a target the company is on a path to achieve by 2025.

Transform

Many customers need data to model and manage risk and future scenarios – many need collaborative applications to track the product’s carbon footprint throughout the supply chain. Sustainability solutions are powered by data. AWS hosts a wide variety of datasets to make this easier, including weather data, satellite data, biological data, and much more. This allows customers to get started without the added burden of having to collect and store everything themselves. The programs below are examples of how AWS offers data for sustainability purposes.

The AWS Open Data Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. The mission of Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative is to reduce the costs, time, and technical barriers to extracting knowledge and insights from large datasets. The AWS Data Exchange is a marketplace for commercial data of all types and includes many data sets of potential relevance to sustainability.

The sustainability pathway is challenging while also presenting unprecedented opportunities. Government policies play a pivotal role in guiding and facilitating the twin transformation journey for enterprises and the ecosystem, both for the local and global level. Public-private partnerships enhance impact and support sustainability efforts. We look to collaborate with policymakers, customers, and innovative industry partners around the world to jointly shape a Cloud-first sustainable future.