of the NCI Agency and NATO

Drawing down the ICT carbon footprint of the NCI Agency and NATO

Dr Peter Lenk, NCI Agency Chief, Service Strategy and Innovation, outlines a strategy for cutting the carbon footprint of NATO’s vast data resources and data-related activities

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NITECH ››› ENSURING ACCESS TO CRITICAL DATA

As NATO’s communications and information expert, we have been developing strategies for reducing the contribution that IT and data make to NATO’s carbon footprint. It may not be obvious to many, but the amount of energy required to run our networks and power our ICT systems is enormous. Therefore, even small changes in behaviour can reap huge rewards. For example, Microsoft estimates that the manufacture of an average smartphone creates 55kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), a Surface laptop 119kg. In the case of the laptop, they estimate that this represents about 78% of the CO2e of the laptop over its three-year lifetime; the other 22% is a result of the energy it takes to run it for three years and generates only 30kg by comparison.

If we replace a laptop every three years, this means we create 119kg CO2e every three years during manufacture, meaning we generate about 40kg of CO2e on average per year. If we were to replace them every five years, this same 119kg results in 24kg per year, a significant improvement. Therefore, we need to encourage industry to develop devices that are modular and upgradeable over their life, rather than disposed of and replaced every few years. We also need to buy higher-spec machines with more memory and higher central processing unit (CPU) performance, so they remain useful for longer. Our strategy should embrace a culture of repair, rather than replacement.

To further reduce our ICT carbon footprint, we should pursue the work started by the Information Technology Modernization (ITM) programme and aggressively centralize our data centres. The reason is simple. In a 2016 report, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that, if 80% of servers in small US data centres were moved over to hyper-scale facilities, this would result in a 25% drop in energy use. If NATO data centres were centralized, not only would this cut the carbon

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THE BIGGER PICTURE

Our environmental impact is not limited to the procurement, running and disposal of our IT systems. COVID-19 has taught us that travel is not nearly as necessary as we once considered it to be. But, if we need to travel, we should use the least environmentally damaging form of transportation available, and ride-sharing should be the norm. Moreover, the NCI Agency and NATO should consider acquiring electric vehicles to replace its petrol/diesel ones.

In fact, we must consider energy consumption in general – from the temperature at which we set our thermostats, to how much air conditioning we use, how we heat our water and how we cook our food. But, more than that, we need to challenge what food our cafeterias serve and ask them to use more local produce. We need to reduce the amount of leftovers we throw away each day. Reducing our energy consumption may also mean considering substituting beef with lower carbon-footprint sources of protein.

We have printed very little since the COVID-19 lockdown started, so do we need to print more as we return to the office? We need to change our professional and personal expectations and not lose the good habits we have acquired during lockdown.

footprint dramatically, it would also make it possible to move the bulk of the ICT infrastructure to locations where electricity generation is cleaner. Of course, NATO would want to retain some geographic diversity, so putting all the data centres in one nation is not an option, but a reduction of the average carbon emissions from 252g/kWh currently to 150g/kWh, or lower, should be achievable.

We can also reduce the power utilization efficiency (PUE) of our data centres. One simple way to achieve this is to move aggressively to the cloud, leveraging the high efficiencies of hyper-scale cloud providers. This is currently feasible for unclassified/low-classification networks. For higher-classified networks, nations with high-efficiency data centres for national purposes could offer space for lease. Going a step further, NATO could even outsource the provision of data-centre services to the nations. With these relatively simple mitigations, a reduction from the current estimated PUE of 1.6 to 1.8 down to 1.2-1.4 should be achievable.

Another way to reduce energy consumption would be to run data centres hotter. Currently, most are at around 20°C, yet Google run theirs at about 25°C. The difference in temperature makes a big difference in cooling demands. The downside is that it shortens the response time in the event of an issue with cooling before systems overheat.

LAPTOPS, TABLETS, SCREENS AND PERIPHERALS

Returning to the subject of devices. NATO uses about 50,000 client devices of a variety of forms. With the growing adoption of laptops, tablets and thin clients (computers running off resources from a central server) the power consumption of these client devices is being incrementally reduced. However, the proliferation of dual screens attached, when docked in the office, and other peripherals drives the energy budget up. Each of the 50,000 devices produce roughly 34 kg of CO2e per year. This means that about 1.7 million kg of CO2e is generated from the client devices alone. That’s without including screens and other peripherals. HPE reports a mean CO2e for their 23-inch monitors of 570 kg over five years, or 124 kg per year. In comparison, their 27-inch monitor generates 580kg and a 34-inch generates 695 kg CO2e. The monitors alone, assuming a single small (23-inch) screen attached to each of the 50,000 client devices and a five-year lifecycle, result in 5,700 metric tonnes of CO2e.

So, a reasonable strategy regarding these devices would be to extend the life of client devices, use more low-power devices (such as laptops, tablets and thin clients) and, when separate screens are required, use single larger screens, rather than numerous smaller screens. When people leave for the evening, they should be encouraged to shut down client devices, monitors, etc, rather than placing them on standby.

These incremental mitigations are not the end of the story; merely the beginning. They also focus on the ICT element of our carbon footprint. We need to address travel, energy use in general and water consumption as well. More specifically, we urgently need to create a culture where people are aware of the impact their actions have on the environment and to develop a set of practices that are climate-conscious. 57

INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE

Kate Maxwell

CTO for Defence & Intelligence, Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector

How is Microsoft helping NATO’s digital transformation?

Microsoft and the NCI Agency are partnering closely to support NATO’s digital transformation initiative. The Agency’s NATO Software Factory is a great example of this, demonstrating how technology can be used to enable new capability development and deployment, innovation and collaboration between different teams working together on a common platform.

The past year has seen a dramatic shift in how defence and intelligence teams work, collaborate and forge new skills. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for secure, resilient, cloud-based solutions, enabling enhanced collaboration with partners, industry and academia across an increasingly remote work environment.

We believe that further adoption of cloud technology will allow NATO to focus on its core mission of consultation and collective defence, taking full advantage of technological advances to enable agility, innovation at speed and scale, as well as a data-driven posture across all operations and missions.

Is culture important to digital transformation?

Culture is a critically important element to digital transformation. The human experience needs to be core to every digital transformation journey. Transformation is not just about technology enablers and IT systems – it is ultimately about people, and how they use and interact with technology to accomplish their jobs. The only way to successfully transform an organization is to get the culture right. A culture with a learning and growth mindset, a healthy tolerance for risk and psychological security are vitally important to transformation efforts taking hold and truly being embraced.

Can Microsoft help NATO turn its data into insights?

We work with organizations such as NATO and coalition partner nations to help them understand their data objectives, governance policies and challenges, then support them through their cloud-adoption process to truly harness data as an asset and turn it into insights. Part of that effort includes helping customers map out their data estate – performing data discovery, classification and mapping, as well as evaluating data sensitivity and characteristics. This gives customers a bird’s-eye view of their data landscape, across all places where the data resides – often across multiple locations, both virtually and geographically, including many operational databases, data warehouses and data lakes, and with storage solutions ranging from on-prem to cloud to edge.

Why are cloud, 5G and Satcoms important to this process?

Mission connectivity is critically important to defence and intelligence customers. At Microsoft, our vision is to bring connectivity to every mission through the intersection of space, 5G and the cloud. We are working to extend the utility of Microsoft Azure capabilities through the power of space infrastructure, creating Azure Space to serve as the platform and ecosystem of choice to meet the mission needs of the space community. We are also partnering with 5G operators and service providers to enable advancements in enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low-latency communications and massive machine-type communication to enable IoT at scale and 5G as a Service (5GaaS) natively from Azure.

Cloud: Actionable information is core to a strong defence and intelligence posture and, given the proliferation of sensors, there is no shortage of data in the defence community. The challenge, however, is turning that data into insights, and making insights available at the time and place of need – including across domains, coalition partners and at the tactical edge. Cloud computing serves as the digital backbone to help meet this challenge for all modern industries – defence and intelligence included. Cloud solutions provide data accessibility, security, scalability, elasticity and significant economies of scale, while enabling innovation and increased productivity on a proven mission platform that extends from headquarters all the way to the tactical edge.

5G and Satcoms: Historically, secure data accessibility at the edge has been a challenge – particularly in disconnected and comms-challenged environments, as well as in expeditionary and forward-deployed scenarios. 5G and space-based communication mechanisms are changing the game for data availability and network extension,

as these previously disconnected environments are suddenly becoming connected, thanks to new highbandwidth, low-latency comms networks and edge-cloud connectivity.

5G infrastructure and softwaredefined networking capability will continue to mature, and each must keep pace with the demand for secure connected-edge computing and communications across the full mission thread. Similarly, as the proliferation of space-based comms infrastructure continues to expand (in particular, due to the explosive growth in small-sat low-earth orbit (LEO) constellations), edge connectivity will become less comms-challenged.

Soon, we will see even the darkest comms corners of the globe become available for edge-cloud connectivity thanks to the space-based network. The combination of 5G and spacebased comms methods, along with existing connectivity solutions like fibre, wi-fi and short-range RF capabilities, will continue to expand defence and intelligence communications as far as the mission thread requires – bringing highintensity, secure cloud computing and comms to some of the planet’s most challenging environments.

Can Microsoft help organizations implement AI and ML?

AI and ML are critical to a data-driven national security policy. Microsoft can help organizations put AI/ML into action through business-process optimization, employee productivity tools and a range of first- and thirdparty applications. For defence workers and business users, Microsoft 365 has infused AI into familiar apps in accessible, user-friendly ways. This helps defence employees improve personal productivity and streamline tasking and daily decision-making. With Microsoft Power Platform, we have taken AI to the next level with democratized, ready-to-use AI that offers users of all levels of technical expertise the ability to create new AI applications with no-code/low-code templates. And for software developers and data scientists, our Azure AI platform provides machine-learning capabilities in Azure to give defence forces the ability to build, train and deploy ML models quickly and at scale.

At Microsoft, we are committed to the advancement of AI driven by ethical principles that put people first, ensuring that AI systems and capabilities are developed responsibly and in ways that warrant trust. We put our responsible AI principles into practice through the Office of Responsible AI (ORA), the AI, Ethics, and Effects in Engineering and Research (Aether) Committee, and Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE).

AI/ML are powerful capabilities that contribute to national security in meaningful ways. It is our responsibility as technologists and members of the global community to hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards and commit to responsible AI research, development and innovation.

What role do partnerships play in Microsoft’s activities?

Our technology partners big and small are great at bringing innovation forward for inclusion in the defence tech stack. With respect to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), the small and commercially facing ISVs have historically had a hard time breaking into the defence community. But that is changing, and Microsoft’s Azure platform and partner ecosystem are part of the solution.

We offer opportunities for collaborative sales, and programs that help our partners grow. We invest in partner onboarding and build-with efforts, training, support and go-to-market resources. Thanks to advancements in cloud platforms, containerization and microservice architectures, it is becoming far easier to rapidly inject new mission capability into the defence tech stack via partnerships, small businesses and non-traditional defence vendors. This further strengthens our partner ecosystem and yields great benefit for the global defence and intelligence ecosystem.