The Purpose of the Certification
Developing trustworthy criteria & verification for purchasing Infrastrastructure-as-a-Service offerings sold by Cloud, Virtual, or Bare Metal service providers.
IT Sustainability is emerging as a strategic topic across small and large organizations around the world. Yet many struggle with getting the trustworthy information they need to determine their environmental impact and identifying focus areas for improvements. Combined with an ongoing trend of outsourcing IT infrastructure to Cloud or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, it is imperative to have trustworthy criteria & reporting requirements for the procurement of sustainable IT infrastructure.
Procurement can play a key role by demanding transparent environmental impact data from IT infrastructure suppliers - be it cloud infrastructure, hosting, or software & services - as well as setting clear criteria on how digital resources are produced and delivered. Together with TCO Development, the SDIA is developing the criteria for a Type I Sustainability Certification which supports procurement teams in getting the right information and sustainably-made resources from suppliers.
Background
Shared IT infrastructure, like Cloud or IaaS platforms, offer the most efficient way to generate and allocate digital resources to software applications today. However, efficiency does not equal sustainability.
Cloud and IaaS infrastructure consists of ICT equipment (servers, routers, switches, storage systems, etc.) that is placed in a data center building (the facility) and administered by an organization (the provider). It is worth noting that many traditional web- and server-hosting providers have also evolved to offer cloud or IaaS offerings, making this label is widely applicable. Cloud and IaaS platforms sell what we term 'digital resources' (please refer to SDIA dictionary for a definition) - essentially units of computation, storage and network capacity.
In order to ensure that digital resources are generated in an environmentally & socially sustainable way and are allocated efficiently by Cloud infrastructure providers, requirements are set on:
- The hardware being used;
- The building being used;
- The organization behind the digital resource;
- The operating principles.
The first two categories are already extensively regulated i.e. through the EU Ecodesign regulation on servers and data storage products (Regulation (EU) 2019/424) and the EU standards relevant for data centers (EN 50600). Further, for each there are existing Ecolabels that can be built upon - from TCO Certified for server equipment to CEEDA and the Blue Angel.
However, there is an absence of clear requirements when it comes to the organization responsible for generating the digital resources and their operating principles. This is the gap in vital information our new sustainability certification will fill.