Enterprises are under pressure to more effectively monitor, manage, and extend their sustainability initiatives. They also need to demonstrate them to customers, partners, and regulators. But just why is data so critical in these “green” goals?
IDC data shows that for just shy of 20% of organizations in Europe, sustainability initiatives account for over 10% of their IT budget. That’s not all. Our data also shows that between 2021 and 2022, there was a 10% increase in the number of European organizations that now consider themselves to be in the mature stages of their sustainability initiatives.
It is, perhaps, not hard to see why.
After another scorching summer in Europe with countless wildfires and other climate-related catastrophes happening one after another, it is clearer than ever that we won’t be able to sustain our current trajectory — worse still our populations’ safety or even the sustainability of our planet in the long term — if we do not act.
Organizations have numerous ways to tackle carbon emissions and become more thoughtful, more sustainable, and better respected. A nice-to-have? Not any more: Climate objectives and regulations are becoming stricter in Europe, and European citizens’ sensitivity to the topic is strong. Customers, partners, and shareholders are all keen to know how organizations are trying to become more sustainable.
Is business sustainability unachievable? Could it be too expensive, too complicated, or too distracting for an organization that is, after all, also having to deal with macroeconomic headwinds? It doesn’t need to be. We are seeing forward-looking enterprises managing to greatly reduce their carbon footprints, make improvements to the recyclability of their packaging, reduce their own energy consumption, and make their products more energy efficient: in general terms, they are becoming greener.
What Has This Got to do with Data?
There is a strong link between sustainability initiatives and effective data management and analytics, and data-driven enterprises are better equipped to start down the sustainability path.
The reason? Modern data and analytics technologies, along with the will to put them to good use, are an organization’s trusted tools for improving environmental impact while also maintaining compliance with regulatory frameworks.
In fact, effective data management and analysis is the fastest, most convenient way to not only measure an organization’s existing efficiency and green credentials, but also to set up green innovations and plan a more sustainable road map.
Data Challenges
Without effective data management, organizations face a number of technical and business challenges.
On the technical side, data is often stored in numerous silos that are hard to join and analyze — and those silos range from legacy, to modern on-premises, to cloud execution venues. In manufacturing — to take just one example — there is often a barrier between IT and operational technology (OT). Some processes and data are, believe it or not, still paper based. Organizations are also still grappling with the ever-increasing amount of data that they need to store, manage, and analyze.
On the business side, there are challenges around skills shortages, management buy-in, and coping with the organizational change of major disruption to existing systems and processes — despite macroeconomic headwinds.
Enter Data Virtualization
Data virtualization is an ideal technology to assist here. Data virtualization enables organizations to bring together data from multiple silos — on premises or in the cloud — and with a low-code or no-code environment, to analyze your sustainability progress. With data virtualization, it is not necessary to make numerous replicas of data sets, which in turn saves on storage (and energy) costs.
Data virtualization aims to put the data you need at your fingertips, while reducing, or even eliminating, replication and its cost. It also aims to optimize query execution to reduce compute requirements, which brings the cost down even further.
Two of the many benefits:
- Reducing laborious queries saves on your own compute costs and environmental impact.
- Accelerated access to data provides a faster understanding of sustainability initiatives: their planning, monitoring, and outcomes.
Data virtualization is one way to boost an organization’s green data immune system, with little or no disruption to existing systems, while ushering in many benefits. Or, to quote the popular saying, “Mighty oaks from small acorns grow.”
To read the full report, How Data Virtualization Offers a Road Map to Enterprise Sustainability, visit here.
To watch the webinar on-demand A Road Map to ESG Powered by Data Virtualization, click here.
To visit the report’s sponsor, Denodo, and download other white papers, visit www.denodo.com.
