As part of their response to the G-Cloud clarification process, the successful supplier provided examples of the types of CO2 reporting from hybrid cloud hosting that they have provided to other clients. Additionally, the supplier proposed working with our IT team to agree how CO2 will be reported both in terms of report content and frequency.
The supplier also committed to using this reporting to work with IT teams to reduce CO2 footprint via monthly optimisation meetings. Ideas for optimisation included automatically switching off non-production environments out of hours and re-platforming legacy applications to benefit from hybrid cloud efficiency.
The contract includes a number of obligations on the supplier to meet technical requirements including ISO accreditations, IT security, data protection, GDPR.
The supplier detailed their internal personal development policies in their response, which included structured internal learning with a wide array of training courses, Human Resources policy providing contractual study leave and lessons learned processes should delivery not meet required standards.
The contract management plan highlighted that the contract manager would be responsible for ensuring the supplier’s response is delivered. This will include monthly optimisation meetings and reporting. IT and Carbon teams will work with the supplier on delivery of this.
The key change for the EIS is the ability to have carbon reporting and for monthly contract management meetings to focus on improvements to carbon usage.
For this particular hybrid cloud platform:
The hybrid cloud provider has committed to ensuring that its data centres will be powered entirely by renewable sources of energy by 2025. Therefore, their already more efficient large data centres will be powered by sustainable means
When renewable energy is included in calculations carbon emissions from compute (where the servers do calculations to help run applications) are 92–98 percent lower than traditional enterprise data centre deployments of compute equivalents when renewable energy is taken into account (52-79 percent when they are not taken into account)
carbon emissions from storage are 79–83 percent lower than traditional enterprise data centre deployments of storage equivalents when renewable energy is taken into account (71-79 percent).
Therefore, the focus of this contract is to monitor actual CO2 usage, seek further improvements and assess the impact of improvements.
One area of interest will be the impact of the hybrid cloud provider moving to renewable sources of energy prior to the end of the contract. SDS are seeking a reporting which demonstrates the impact of their own changes separately from the CO2 benefit provided from the hosting provider themselves. For example, SDS’ changes include switching servers off, throttling, and moving additional services to hybrid cloud from less efficient hosting solutions.
For further examples of the carbon savings that can be brought about by including switch-off options, see the case study Reducing carbon footprint in ICT upgrade at Glasgow Kelvin College, also hosted on the Sustainable Procurement Tools.
The information above and CO2 reduction promises from the hybrid cloud provider mean that substantial CO2 savings are being made in comparison to the previous hosting model. It should also be noted that there are various substantial promises being made by the small number of hybrid cloud providers so these benefits would likely be achieved by bodies that move to this model regardless of the hybrid cloud solution chosen.
Hybrid cloud hosting has many benefits in terms of cost efficiency and quality benefits such as increased security and improved flexibility in setting up environments.
The inclusion of climate benefit strengthened the overall goals. Rather than state high level average CO2 savings, actual savings can now be reported on, whilst being able to identify CO2 savings of further specific improvements. Potentially this could impact future prioritisation – i.e., will hosting still be a high priority for Skills Development Scotland if it is known that CO2 usage is being kept at a low level?
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