The SMB Advantage: How Cloud Technology Powers Sustainable Impact

Although small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of the global economy, they have tremendous untapped potential as drivers of sustainable development. According to the International Labor Organization, SMBs represent 90% of all companies globally, account for roughly 70% of employment and drive up to 70% of global GDP. Their collective carbon footprint is enormous, suggesting an enormous impact if they can meet their green ambitions.

SMB leaders are overwhelmingly interested in operating more sustainably. A 2021 World Economic Forum survey revealed that 69% of SMB leaders included sustainability in their mission statement, yet only 51% integrated their mission into their business strategy. According to Tanuja Randery, Managing Director, AWS EMEA, greater adoption of cloud services by SMBs may be the key to closing this gap. Cloud-based tools can reduce energy consumption and help businesses collect and analyze data that informs decision-making and actions to meet sustainability targets.

Switching to sustainable data infrastructure

By hosting business information and workloads in AWS data centers, rather than on premises, SMBs can reduce their carbon emissions to help reach their sustainability goals more quickly. AWS data centers are reducing energy use and decreasing the amount of electricity needed for storage and computational power. AWS is committed to ensuring that their data centers are as green as possible, says Randery.

“Our AWS cloud data centers are designed for efficiency, often using renewable energy sources and advanced cooling systems to help reduce the overall environmental footprint that is often associated with on-premises data centers,” she says. “A 451 Research survey indicated that AWS infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the median of US enterprise data centers, and up to 5 times more energy-efficient than the average European enterprise data center.”

For ZeroNorth, a Danish technology company that helps shipping companies reduce operating costs and emissions, moving its data infrastructure to AWS was instrumental in growing its business. While in the market for a cloud provider, ZeroNorth was to modernize its software stack. With the support of AWS, ZeroNorth used cloud technology to create a centralized platform that consolidated its legacy systems and accelerated its adoption of digital services. The cloud also made data accessible to everyone across the business, providing teams with transparency and the tools to make decisions quickly.

ZeroNorth provides ship captains with crucial information, such as weather, wind direction and waiting times, to help them plan optimal routes, allowing them to avoid storms and navigate with the wind at the vessel’s back to optimize fuel consumption. Working with AWS helps ZeroNorth enable its clients to transport goods faster and more energy-efficiently, and contributes to their decarbonization efforts.

Cloud-based data analytics powers optimization and transparency

Cloud-based tools enable SMBs to collect and analyze sustainability-related data in real time. This allows companies to better understand, optimize and manage their use of energy, water and other resources, and the efficiency of their waste reduction efforts. Randery points out that by using cloud-based data analytics, businesses can simultaneously create new efficiencies in their operations, reduce waste and streamline costs.

The CropX Agronomic Farm Management System is one such example. “CropX, an agricultural analytics company, helps farmers integrate soil data with numerous above-ground data layers,” says Randery. “By running on AWS, CropX is helping its farming customers contribute to increased sustainability by using less energy and fewer resources. For example, during irrigation experiments using its technology, CropX has demonstrated more than 40% water savings across different crop types, with a 10% yield increase.”

By utilizing cloud-based analytics, SMBs can quickly perform internal reporting of their sustainability metrics. “With the AWS customer carbon footprint tool, our customers who have set carbon reduction goals can more accurately measure the emissions associated with their use of AWS. This tool also reports on customers’ corporate emissions, and provides data to show progress toward future reduction targets,” says Randery. All this helps SMBs demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and meet reporting requirements for stakeholders, customers and investors.

The cloud’s sustainable impact

Cloud technology is playing a pivotal role in helping businesses drive sustainability. Encouragingly, this view is increasingly shared by business leaders. A recent survey conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, Atos and AWS shows that nearly half of the businesses that migrated their legacy data to the cloud are seeing measurable carbon reduction as a result. Fifty-eight percent of companies that have digitalized most or all of their sustainability initiatives say they feel successful in decarbonization, while an overall 70% of the surveyed business leaders believe that cloud solutions will accelerate their journey to net-zero by at least two years.

Many businesses that have recorded progress toward this goal are now cloud advocates. For SMBs, cloud infrastructure and data analytics are the potential twin engines that can boost their operations and help lower their carbon footprint by reducing energy use and costs, minimizing waste and streamlining internal reporting.