Microsoft adds new 'Cloud for Sustainability' bundle to its specialty cloud list
Microsoft already has announced a bunch of vertical/industry-specific cloud bundles. Today, July 14, on Day 1 of its virtual Inspire partner conference, Microsoft announced another cloud bundle called Cloud for Sustainability, which is more horizontal than vertical.
Like its Cloud for Healthcare, Cloud for Retail, Cloud for Financial, Cloud for Manufacturing and Cloud for Nonprofits, Microsoft's Cloud for Sustainability is meant to help business users adapt the base Microsoft cloud services for specific purposes. These industry clouds combine common data models, cross-cloud connectors, workflows, application programming interfaces and industry-specific components and standards. They are designed for use with Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform tools and other Microsoft services and are meant to connect front-end productivity tasks to backend data management, officials said.
From Microsoft's description of Cloud for Sustainability:
"With Cloud for Sustainability, we're creating a whole new category, going beyond capturing data to helping customers aggregate sustainability data in an actionable way. It includes Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings that can discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide accurate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals and enable intelligent insights for organizations to take more effective action."
Cloud for Sustainability can help with tasks like reporting on IT carbon emissions, creating sustainability scorecards for tracking progress against carbon-emission-reduction goals, and pinpointing specific emission areas to track.
A preview of Cloud for Sustainability is now available to interested customers.
In January 2020, Microsoft committed to having a 100% renewable energy supply for all operations by 2025, inclusive of data centers, buildings and campuses. From now on, Microsoft will match 100% of all energy used with zero-carbon sources by 2030, in addition to procuring its own 100% renewable energy supply by 2025.