Cloud storage firm Wasabi and Zero Circle, a sustainable finance marketplace, have hooked up to try to give businesses the data they need to “reduce their environmental impact.”
Wasabi has integrated Zero Circle’s invoice-based carbon footprint calculator to give customers “transparency” and a real-time assessment of their emissions.
Customers can upload their Wasabi invoice to Zero Circle’s carbon calculator to determine their estimated CO2 footprint, based on actual data stored in a Wasabi storage region. This “increases the accuracy of their ESG benchmarking” with their peers, claimed Wasabi.
Wasabi’s “hot” storage services may well generate relatively high CO2 emissions among customers, as they constantly access stored data for use by their operational applications through the cloud.
According to the Wasabi 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index, sustainability ranks among the top three most important considerations for buyers when choosing a cloud storage service. Factors like ESG commitments, energy-efficient architecture design, and native tools for carbon footprint calculation are all increasingly important to modern enterprises as they adopt cloud infrastructure services, maintains the provider.
The inference is that cloud service providers must deliver accurate, reliable tools, metrics, and programs to meet customer expectations, as well as do everything technically possible at their end to store and deliver the data in a sustainable way to their customers on-demand.
The publicity around emissions generated by the cloud services industry is steady. Earlier this month, it was reported that Google’s greenhouse gas emissions last year were 48 percent higher than in 2019.
According to the hyperscaler’s latest environmental report, the leap was down to the increasing amounts of energy needed by its growing global datacenter footprint, exacerbated by the big growth of energy-sucking AI data workloads.
“Partnering with Zero Circle underscores Wasabi’s dedication to providing top-tier, sustainable cloud storage solutions,” insisted David Boland, vice president of cloud strategy at Wasabi Technologies. “Zero Circle’s carbon footprint calculation has already enabled Wasabi, our partners, and customers to gain a deeper understanding of our environmental impact.”
By integrating this information into its supply chain, Wasabi was “amplifying” the benefits for everyone, he said.
The Wasabi collaboration marked a “significant step” in advancing environmental sustainability within the cloud storage sector,” added Hemanth Setty, founder and CEO of Zero Circle. “This paves the way for innovative and groundbreaking solutions.”
The carbon footprint solution is now available to all Wasabi customers, and the pair are also “exploring” other “eco-friendly” initiatives, such as renewable energy procurement and carbon offset programs to “further reduce” the environmental impact of cloud storage.
Zero Circle is a green finance marketplace that “simplifies access” to green capital for mid-tier businesses. Its AI-powered platform streamlines sustainability assessments and reporting, and automates financial and sustainability KPIs to “incentivise” green financing, it says.
