Meet your sustainability goals with AWS and Daemon

The world is focused on climate change right now. We believe that optimism around sustainability is possible. A mix of tech innovation and collaboration can shape change. But in 2024, sustainability can no longer be siloed, it must be linked to every part of your business.

This belief was reflected in this year’s AWS Summit. The dedicated central stand brought to everyone’s attention how the climate is a key priority for 2024. Renewable energy and climate consciousness are topics close to our hearts at Daemon, it’s a core part of our Impact North Star. 

We can help you leverage tech advancements to support your sustainability goals. AWS is now 100% run on green energy, and as an AWS Advanced Partner, we’re one of few consultancies trusted to provide AWS services on behalf of Amazon. This means we’re in the perfect position to help you leverage AWS to make your business more sustainable.

Snippet of this year's AWS Summit

Sustainability front and centre 

Sustainability was front and centre at AWS Summit 2024. The packed-out talks covered reducing carbon footprint, saving water, and optimising energy usage. Daemonites were eager to learn about new sustainable cloud computing initiatives and, how AWS collaborates with companies to combat climate change.

Our Head of Data, ML & AI, Ian Ray, spoke to one of the AWS sustainability experts to find out more:

“We spoke to one of the AWS experts about implementing sustainability strategies for our clients. They explained their new approach and framework where connecting different AWS tools and services together provided an initial base creating dashboards and unlocking important insights. This now really helps support sustainability goals for our own and our client's businesses.”

AWS's commitment to sustainability is far from lip service. While they aim to help your business with its goals, they practise what they preach:

• In 2022, the electricity consumed in 19 AWS Regions across the US, Canada, Europe, China and Asia-Pacific was attributable to 100% renewable energy
• Every year 3.9 billion litres of water are returned to communities as part of AWS replenishment projects
• AWS is on track to power operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025

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Time for change 

Prioritising sustainability in your business has never been more pressing. With tech-related greenhouse gases increasing by 30% each year, we must take action. Sustainability can no longer be a siloed unit within your organisation. It must be woven into every part of the business. Here are some worrying effects the tech industry is having on the environment:

• Electronic waste generated by the tech industry is set to increase by 347 million tonnes a year. Only ⅕ of this waste is currently recycled.
• Large data centres can consume up to 19 million litres of water daily
• Mining for conflict minerals used in the tech industry can cause serious damage. This includes deforestation, human rights abuses and the decimation of animal populations.

Sustainability through collaboration

We know that it can be overwhelming to consider the scale of the problem and how you can make a difference. We’re here to help you leverage AWS tools and solutions to reach your goals and make a big impact. Here are some of the ways we can work together with you and AWS:

• Cloud migration

Migrating to the cloud is one of the most impactful ways to reach your sustainability goals. Migrating to AWS can lower your workload carbon footprint by up to 80%. Once AWS is fully powered by renewable energy, this will increase to 96%. 

At Daemon, we’re experts in cloud services and we’ll support your journey every step of the way. Our cloud migration includes assessment, migration, and modernisation of cloud-native and microservice architecture. Cloud adoption helps you do your bit in the fight against climate change. But it also enables you to reduce costs and gain flexibility. It's a no-brainer! 

“Migrating to the cloud can make a big difference to your environmental impact. AWS’s infrastructure is five times more energy-efficient than typical European data centres. Moving to AWS can slash your carbon footprint, and Dameon can make the transition as smooth as possible.” Ian Ray 

Read more: How we partnered with Vertu Motors to help them migrate to AWS

• AWS Well-Architected Review 

We’ve embedded DevOps into Daemon services, including our AWS services. We can offer our AWS Well-Architected Review for existing AWS customers, including our unique Daemon Pre-Discovery offering. Aligning your business with the Well-Architected framework can help you achieve your sustainability goals and improve the performance of your cloud service.

One of the six pillars of the framework is sustainability.  This pillar helps you to apply design principles when architecting your workloads. This will increase your sustainability and minimise impact. These principles are:

• Understanding your impact
• Establishing sustainability goals 
• Maximising utilisation
• Anticipating and adopting new, more efficient hardware and software
• Using managed services 
• Reducing the downstream impact of your cloud workloads

Read more: How our Well-Architected Review helped Superdry to get more from AWS

• Mitigating energy usage 

AWS is always looking for innovative ways to mitigate energy usage. This could involve increasing the performance of their data centres or examining the usage and sharing of CPUs across stacks. Sharing resources can mitigate the need for chip mining or building new data centres.

AWS also offers many different instances in the cloud. You can scale up and down so you won’t need super fast chips to run different environments. Not only does this reduce your energy consumption, but it also reduces your costs. 

“The sharing of resources is another great way to reduce energy consumption. For example, if one company shuts down one of its servers, the resources can now be used by another company. There’s no reason they can’t use the same resources. This mitigates the need for more data centres and mining for additional chips.” Ian Ray 

To discuss how we can help you leverage AWS to mitigate your energy uses, get in touch today. 

Making an Impact

Sustainability is important to us at Daemon, as a company and as individuals. We were pleased to see this sentiment echoed at the AWS summit. We’ve interwoven sustainability across the business in our Impact North Star. Here are a few ways we make an impact:

• Cloud migration is a big part of our work and our push for sustainability. We help companies migrate to the cloud and reduce their environmental impact, which in turn helps us reduce our impact.
• Our dedicated sustainability team ensures we hold ourselves accountable and reach our targets. Daemonites Ian Ray and Fran Knight head up the team. They work together to weave sustainability into every area of our company.
• We prioritise tracking our progress. We have regular reporting to keep us moving forward and setting future goals. 

We’re optimistic about the future at Daemon. By working together, we can impact real change in the world. Talk to us today and find out how we can support your sustainability goals.