How Can A Dex Platform Assist Organizations Meet Today’s Detailed Sustainability Reporting Requirements?

Much has been made of 2024 being ‘the’ year, with Gareth Southgate’s squad one of the bookmakers’ favourites to win the UEFA European Football Championships. Could they finally do it and end 58 years of pain for England? (We’ve not won a major international tournament since 1966 as everyone knows).  

As it turns out, the answer was ‘no’. Well done to Spain after their 2-1 result.  They were frankly the better team and deserve to lift the Euro 2024 trophy. For us, ‘it’s coming home’ will just have to wait for another day. 

2024 is also a pivotal year when it comes to the environment.  For the financial year 2024, large and listed SME companies in the EU will have to – for the first time – provide detailed sustainability information as part of the Corporate Sustainability & Reporting Directive (CSRD). This modernises and strengthens EU Commission rules by introducing mandatory and standardised reporting and auditing. It also broadens the number of the firms that have to submit ESG information to financial markets and other stakeholders so that investors and consumers can see and assess those organisations who claim to be environmentally responsible, thereby ending so-called ‘greenwashing’. 

If you meet two of the following three conditions, you must report for CSRD: €50 million in net turnover, €25 million in assets or 250 employees. And it does affect British firms if they generate over €150 million worth of revenue in the EU market either via subsidiaries or securities.  

It should be noted that the UK’s Climate Change Act 2008 includes an amendment to the Companies Act 2006 requiring all London Stock Exchange listed companies, large unquoted firms and limited liability partnerships to report their greenhouse gas emissions, too. Public sector organisations are required to adopt sustainable IT practices as well.

Organisations will have to provide data about their Scope 1 direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – these result from company boilers and owned vehicles for example – along with Scope 2 and Scope 3 indirect carbon emissions.  

In terms of end user computing, Scope 2 covers electricity used by devices, datacentres and networks and Scope 3 applies to GHG emissions arising from the manufacture and shipping of devices along with employees travelling to work. 

A decade ago ‘green IT’ initiatives were quite simplistic. They pretty much focused on optimising what you had and encouraging people to save power by turning off their monitors, PCs and laptops overnight and servers at the weekend.  The shift today to ‘sustainable IT’ is far more rigorous and comprehensive.  

There’s now consensus that the following can make a step change difference to an organization’s GHG footprint and overall environmental impact:

1. Cloud computing trumps on-prem data centres.  Shifting IT compute, storage and applications to the cloud is a recognised safe and secure way of managing IT better, with resources able to expand and contract as an organisation requires without equipment continually needing to be bought.  Economies of scale in (cloud) facilities mean better overall efficiency too, with individual firms avoiding the need to build, equip and run secondary data centres for disaster recovery purposes.  This all adds up to considerable GHG savings.  
2. Remote working drives down CO2 emissions.  Running digital workspaces in the cloud – via VDI or DaaS for example – means staff can access all their applications and files such that ‘work from anywhere’ is a true reality, without productivity being affected at all. Where organisations embrace hybrid remote working, commuter miles can therefore be slashed. 
3. Device displacement gets you off the hamster wheel cycle of upgrading laptops and PCs all the time. The fixation for continually buying new endpoints self-evidently means more resources – plastics, paper, metals and glass – are consumed during manufacturing and delivery with all the obvious GHG implications.  

Shifting to VDI or DaaS and then running a tried and tested solution like IGEL OS on the endpoint can extend the lifespan of a device by up to 5 years. Research by ICT carbon footprint consultancy, PX3, at a large UK financial services organisation with 3,150 staff shows that a displacement strategy can deliver whopping benefits:

• 60% reduction in carbon footprint across a 5-year period by repurposing devices; 
• Potential combined Scope 2 and 3 emissions dropping from 425,983 kgCO2e to 169,945 kgCO2e – equivalent to avoiding 927,808 car miles or the sequestering capacity of 307 forest acres.
• 55% drop in project costs from £992,462 to £452,644 over the 5-year period meaning the company saved an impressive £539,818.

Get accurate real-time visibility about your environment

Turning to how ControlUp can specifically help with CSRD reporting.  Our platform assists in three primary ways: first, on-prem data center to cloud migrations; second, endpoint asset management; and third, Windows 11 readiness.  

Cloud migrations

We enable organisations to comprehensively assess their on-premise virtual desktop environments so they can make informed decisions about the virtual machines they need to ‘spin up’ in the cloud (when they make the transition) based on actual usage.  

This is crucially important.  Microsoft Azure offers simply loads of options for organisations so selecting the right virtual machines (VMs) for any given workload can be confusing.  There are general purpose VMs, compute orientated, memory optimised, GPU accelerated and storage specific. The sheer number is comprehensive and impressive but almost overpowering and complex, begging the question as to where one should begin?

ControlUp solves this by helping with the detailed sizing and Azure cost calculations through extensive monitoring of existing systems and then connection to Azure to literally show customers the optimum solution to take.  This ‘right sizes’ the service and avoids budget being wasted.  

Endpoint assets management

In terms of endpoint asset management, our DEX platform enables reports to be run which log how many devices are actually deployed, their specification and health. This is far-reaching covering: manufacturer, model, serial number, RAM, physical and logical CPUs, battery health, OS, OS version and patch level. 

By using the telemetry provided, customers can make educated buying decisions which benefit the planet (and saves money).  So, for example, if the data shows that an individual’s laptop has poor battery health, rather than an IT department responding to the end user’s gripes about its (failing) performance and ordering a new one, they can simply link to the manufacturer’s warranty site and buy a replacement battery. This extends the life of the endpoint device with all the knock on GHG benefits.  

Windows 11.  Are you ready? 

The same goes for Windows 11.  By running a Windows readiness report, it’s quick to see which devices need to be changed rather than a wholesale rip and replace of a desktop estate which incidentally many organisations do.  That’s ludicrous given the demands to consume less and repurpose more.  

This all adds up to better control and visibility of IT. There’s no doubt about it, because of the real-time data our DEX platform provides, IT performance monitoring is enhanced and better purchasing decisions facilitated which directly and positively impact on our customers’ ability to comply with CSRD reporting rules and the scores they ultimately achieve.  

Want to learn more about how ControlUp can help with your sustainability plans, set up a meeting today!