LEADERS SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATION

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WRITTEN BY: TOM SWALLOW

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS HAMMOND

Why is sustainable digital transformation and infrastructure modernisation important?

The world is on the verge of a recession with staggering levels of inflation, increasing energy prices, a climate crisis, and unprecedented disruption.

Digital Transformation underpinned by a modern, agile, flexible, secure, and resilient foundational architecture, is imperative for survival, but it is not enough.

Now, there is a legal, as well as a moral, obligation to reduce EU emissions by at least 55% by 2030. The Equinix 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey showed that over 70% of IT leaders said that reducing environmental impact is a critical driver of their technology strategy and 65% of digital leaders expressed that they will only work with partners that meet their carbon reduction targets.

Organisations are meeting this obligation head on with ambitious corporate sustainability goals in place alongside their digital transformation and infrastructure modernisation programmes. With only one IT refresh cycle left until 2030, the decisions made in 2023 will have a huge impact on the ability to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

Yet, the backdrop faced by the digital leaders has never been more complex.

Supply chain issues, chip shortages, technical debt, legacy infrastructure, changing stakeholder requirements, and rigid infrastructure all create financial, operational and energy inefficiencies which threaten to overwhelm digital transformation and the infrastructure modernisation required to achieve it.

Equinix enables organisations to modernise their networks, move appropriate business applications and workloads to the cloud, minimise cloud egress costs, virtualise their digital footprint and house remaining legacy infrastructure within Platform Equinix®.

Organisations have the flexibility to run the workloads wherever it makes the most sense; on premises, at the edge or in multiple cloud locations around the world, whilst also ensuring security and data sovereignty requirements are met.

This composable infrastructure allows organisations the flexibility to address the operational and power inefficiencies whilst reducing cost which allows them to accelerate their digital transformation and achieve sustainability goals.

Sustainability at Equinix

Platform Equinix – Where Sustainable Digital Transformation happens

To understand how to facilitate a sustainable transformation, we turn to the experts at Equinix to uncover the steps along the journey.

Grace Andrews, Principal Product Evangelist at Equinix, delves into the organisation’s mission and how it approaches digital transformation.

“Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company. Platform Equinix provides the foundational infrastructure—data centres, interconnection, and digital infrastructure services—that power the digital economy.

“We’ve transformed Equinix from a colocation provider to a digital infrastructure platform, which supports the digital transformation of our customers.

“During the pandemic, we saw unprecedented demand for digital services. Platform Equinix, with vibrant digital ecosystems and foundational infrastructure enabled via software, meets the needs of customers who now operate in a highly virtualized world.

“The coronavirus pandemic fundamentally, and in some cases permanently, changed the way we work, the way we educate our children, the way we interact with family, the way we shop and entertain ourselves… Enabling this digital transformation is what we do.

How can organisations integrate their digital and sustainability strategy into a coherent roadmap?

Platform & Product Marketing Director, Direnc Dogruoz tells us: “Organisations must start with optimising the core of their network; relying on shared, on-demand services and platforms powered by renewable energy. From that network hub, they can start virtualizing infrastructure and interconnecting to public and private clouds adjacent to mission-critical data in a way that is designed to be inherently more sustainable, secure, cost-effective and agile.

“Organisations can deploy with Equinix physically—in our core network hubs—to consume energy more efficiently. Our hubs in the EMEA region are covered by 100% renewable energy, supported by our stateof-the-art efficiency measures, such as software-optimised systems and industryleading power usage effectiveness (PUE), water management, waste heat recovery, liquid cooling and alternative fuel sources. By moving infrastructure into an Equinix facility, customers transfer the scope 1 emissions related to owning and operating their own facilities. For more information on all of this please visit our sustainability website www.sustainability.equinix.com Mark Anderson,VP, Global Technical Sales at Equinix explains, “This shared network architecture helps to address the most significant conundrum in sustainable digital transformation: increasing the use of IT resources for compute and storage drives up power consumption and other digital emissions. Breaking the connection between increased use of IT resources and energy consumption is crucial.”