The concept of ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – efforts has surged in recent years. The focus always seems to be around large, public and consumer-facing people or organizations. Has this clothing company landed themselves in hot water with a risky campaign? Has a celebrity gone off the deep end, getting dropped by their record label & management team?

That’s not always the case, though. B2B businesses are subject to ESG standards. They may not have hard lines or policies they have to align with, but a combination of public perception and investor concerns are enough to make businesses consider the impact of their actions and initiatives on their ESG rating. But, is there a hard benefit or cost to ESG beyond the scrutiny of the public and/or investors?

It turns out that yes, there is – there are numerous industries where funding and grants are not available to organizations that cannot prove that they’ve reduced  

Enter NetApp’s Evolved Cloud. As I wrote about before, one of the four pillars of the Evolved Cloud is Sustainability.

I had admitted that I had never heard of sustainability – aka ESG – being a reason why a customer would go with one provider over another, or with one type of solution over another. Some customers may put sustainability questions in their RFIs/RFQs in an effort to align with their corporate values, but I’ve always wondered how much weight that carried vs. a lower price point in another RFI. It’s getting easier for ISVs, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Customers to pursue these goals, wih hyperscalers being able to offer things like carbon-neutral solutions, net-zero deforestation from construction ad timelines to zero-waste and water-positive certifications.  

Now, I’ve changed my tune. NetApp’s Insight event had a compelling story here around 4:1 efficiencies that offloaded cold data to a carbon neutral hyperscaler, reducing emission to the tune of 600k gallons of gas or 6M lbs of coal.

That may be viable for organizations with petabytes of data, but what about the SMB and mid-market customers and the MSPs that serve them – how can they take advantage of cloud solutions that offer those types of benefits while reducing their on-prem carbon footprint? Getting rid of a fileserver and/or client/server app’s database may be a pair of easy first steps, but what’s after that?

Enter Cloud Desktops, or VDI. More specifically, Windows 365 – a managed, turnkey virtual desktop service that runs on top of Azure Virtual Desktop in the Microsoft Azure cloud. With Windows 365, your end users’ desktops are running in the cloud, rather than on physical laptops. Instead, more energy efficient (and less costly) thin clients can be used.

One of the hallmarks of Windows 365 is the “security in layers” concept (Defender, no more gateways, Intune and M365 policies, etc.), which is true all the way down to the physical buildings in which the VMs are housed. We can draw a parallel to sustainability here - the physical data centers are subject to Microsoft’s broader sustainability initiatives. This means that similar to how you can pull reports from the Microsoft Trust Center to use in your audits, by adopting Windows 365 your organization can reference EVERYTHING Microsoft does for sustainability in your own efforts. This goes far beyond emissions and power consumption to include optimizing water use, sustainable packaging, eliminating single-use plastics and much more.

So if your organization is subject to grant funding by way of increased sustainability or reduced emissions, I heavily encourage you to consider Windows 365. If you’re a service provider filling out an RFI or bidding on a book of business, don’t hesitate to include Windows 365 as an option. The more important that a sustainabiltiy initiative is for an organization, the more likely they are to take you up on your offer to give Windows 365 a look.