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Accelerate your journey to net-zero with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. This release marks another step in our goal to empower organizations to accelerate their sustainability progress and business growth by bringing together a growing set of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud portfolio plus solutions from our global ecosystem of partners. 

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The imperative to move to net-zero emissions and reverse the damage from the last two centuries of the industry can seem like a daunting endeavor. With increasing regulation and growing customer demand for positive change, organizations across multiple industries are embracing the challenge and Microsoft is here to help. Sustainability has been at the core of our business for more than a decade. As we operationalize Microsoft’s sustainability plan,1 we are sharing our expertise and developing tools and methods that customers can replicate. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is our first horizontal industry cloud designed to work across multiple industries. Our solutions can be customized to specific industry needs, whether a customer is in retail, energy, manufacturing, or another industry. At its core is a data model that aligns with Greenhouse Gas Protocols—the standard in identifying and recording emissions information. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability also reflects the deep relationships we have with partners that enable us to offer better together solutions to solve critical customer needs and customer problems.  

Watch the demo video of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability in action.

This release of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability delivers Microsoft and partner solutions across four investment areas to empower organizations in their sustainability efforts: 

  1. Unify data intelligence.  
  1. Build a sustainable IT infrastructure. 
  1. Reduce environmental impact of operations.
  1. Create sustainable value chains.

Unify your data intelligence 

Customers face many challenges in acquiring and identifying data, unifying it, and creating a single and actionable view of their sustainability data. Our Microsoft Sustainability Manager built on top of our data model enables organizations to easily input, extract, and understand data. It centralizes emissions-related data to help streamline data ingestion, sharing, and reporting. Customers can see results quickly with the prebuilt calculation models and can further configure calculations to support their specific needs. The consistency delivered by our data model enables more accurate and reliable reporting. Unified data represents the foundation of our approach to sustainability, providing customers with a rich and self-service data integration and calculation experience with rich connectors to key partner applications.  

Screen capture of Sustainability Manager emissions overview. Several charts and graphs reflect an organization's emissions status over a reporting period.
Figure 1: Use your data to report insights and act with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. 
Screen capture of Microsoft Sustainability Manager reflecting regional and facility scorecards with Microsoft Teams chat.
Figure 2: Sustainability teams can collaborate on goals via Microsoft Teams while tracking facility emissions scorecards. 

Building a sustainable IT infrastructure 

Replacing tools, systems, and activities with more energy-efficient options, including migrating workloads to the cloud, is one of the first steps to building sustainable IT infrastructure. Moving from on-premises to Microsoft Azure can reduce carbon and energy emissions. The Azure Migration and Modernization Program—which utilizes system integrator partners to drive cloud workload migration for customers—has been a key investment that ultimately enables these sustainability benefits.   

To help organizations measure the sustainability impact of migrating to the cloud, in October 2021 we shipped the Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard (EID). The Emissions Impact Dashboard provides customers with independently verified emissions data associated with using Azure; inclusive of scopes one, two, and three. Organizations also gain visibility into emissions avoided by migrating productivity workloads to the cloud. As of April 2022, over a thousand customers are actively using it to estimate and report on emissions savings.   

Screen capture of Emissions Impact Dashboard, a Power BI application which shows customers their azure emissions, user over time, annual trends, and carbon emissions defined by scope.
Figure 3: Emissions Impact Dashboard. 

We’ve also released the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365 (in preview) to bring the same level of transparency to the use of Microsoft 365 services. 

Screen capture of Microsoft 365 Emissions Impact Dashboard is a Power BI applications which shoes the carbon emissions for scope 1,2, and 3. There are 2 time series graphs, one that looks at the data year over year and another one that breaks the data down into quarterly usage.
Figure 4: Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365. 

Reduce environmental impact of operations 

Organizations drive sustainability progress by reducing, removing, and replacing processes that have a high environmental impact. This includes reducing the environmental impact of buildings, space, and equipment through smart facilities. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability prioritizes solutions that help reduce energy consumption, create smart facilities, and focus on collaboration and planning tools. As part of our efforts to help customers reduce environmental impact, we partner with companies such as Johnson Controls, Inc (JCI). Their OpenBlue Enterprise Manager is a solution suite to drive sustainability, operational, and space health goals from a single pane of glass. Enterprise Manager enables a suite of capabilities to monitor, analyze and optimize energy, asset, space, health, and occupant comfort parameters to improve ESG scores and enable the right balance among competing priorities. 

“Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability advance our capabilities to create solutions that enable greater customer experiences and outcomes, which in turn increase safety, health and sustainability worldwide—a win for our customers, our businesses, and our planet.”—George Oliver, Chief Excecutive Officer, Johnson Controls, Inc. 

Create sustainable value chains  

Transparency throughout an organization’s value chain is imperative to achieve progress in becoming more sustainable, and organizations need accurate and reliable upstream and downstream data. This is mostly managed through survey-based data or by manually obtaining supplier ratings and data from organizations such as EcoVadis, which rates more than 90,000 companies on their sustainability and is one of the leading providers of this information. We’re exploring opportunities with EcoVadis to surface rating data alongside our supplier data in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability analytics and reporting experiences. With this, organizations would be able to utilize information to inform supplier selection through the ingestion of supplier ESG ratings, emissions values, and revenue intensity scores from EcoVadis to unify data with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.  

“Businesses are realizing that their value chain is the largest lever for driving sustainability improvement and impact, and they need ESG management tools with a global view to guide their strategy and action plans. Our sustainability ratings in combination with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability would empower businesses with essential insights for better decision making, and fuel the innovation needed to drive sustainability impact at global scale.”—Pierre-Francois Thaler, Co-Chief Executive Officer, EcoVadis.

PowerBI visual for companies to see an overview of all their carbon emissions. The dashboard has been altered to add emissions by Supplier and to bring in the sustainability rating of each supplier powered by EcoVadi
Figure 5: EcoVadis and Microsoft Sustainability Manager providing supply chain insights.

Deployment orchestration with the Microsoft Cloud Solution Center 

The beauty of our industry clouds is that they each contain a composable set of use case scenarios to meet organizations wherever they are in their sustainability journey. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is uniquely designed for organizations, across multiple industries and geographies, to start with their greatest business pain points and identify how best to overcome them. Our deployment orchestrator, specifically developed for Microsoft Industry Clouds, allows for easy consumption and updates of these use case scenarios across customer environments around the world.  

Screen capture of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Solution Center. Six tiles with hyperlinks illustrated: Data integration and calculation, Reporting, disclosure and automated insights, Workload migration to the cloud, Responsible devices, Collaboration and planning, and Cloud for Sustainability data model
Figure 6: Accelerate your sustainability progress through automated data connections and actionable insights. 

Find your better together solution and learn more 

Our industry clouds are bolstered by our collaboration with industry experts across our unmatched global ecosystem of trusted partners. We work with leading independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators, and advisory partners, so our customers in every region have comprehensive solutions they need to address their unique business challenges. Our partner ecosystem boasts solutions across multiple industries. Trusted advisers like Accenture, Avanade, Capgemini, EY, PwC, and Tata Consultancy Services are actively helping organizations plan, design, and implement strategies to enable sustainable growth. 

“The cloud is enabling entirely new ways to innovate, while putting sustainability at the core of the business—from unlocking clean energy transitions, to enabling the use of digital twins in manufacturing. As a long-time partner with Microsoft, we can help clients get the most from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, embedding sustainability into products and services and leveraging data-led insights to measure and manage their sustainability performance. These are critical capabilities for success in achieving not just net-zero goals but also in delivering 360° value for all stakeholders that could reinvent this space with ESG at the heart.”—Peter Lacy, Global Sustainability Services Lead and Chief Responsibility Officer, Accenture. 

Learn more about the breakthrough work being done by our sustainability partners at Microsoft AppSource. Find the right sustainability solution for your organization from partners such as ABB, Bentley Systems, Blue Yonder, Ecolab, EcoVadis, Honeywell, ICONICS, Johnson Controls, and Transparency-One.  

Learn more at Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and sign up for a trial today. 

1An update on Microsoft’s sustainability commitments: Building a foundation for 2030, The Official Microsoft Blog.

Satish Thomas headshot
Satish Thomas
Corporate Vice President at Microsoft
Thomas is Corporate Vice President responsible for strategy, product management and engineering execution for the Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Industry AI.

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