SAN ANTONIO, TX. – October 13, 2022 – Frost & Sullivan recently assessed the sustainability and circularity in the cloud services industry and, based on its findings, recognizes Microsoft with the 2022 Global Company of the Year Award. The company provides cutting-edge cloud services and solutions enabling organizations across different industries to increase sustainability and reduce emissions in their business practices and operations. With a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund for sustainability initiatives, Microsoft will advance the commercialization and implementation of its cutting-edge sustainable cloud services and solutions across numerous market segments, attracting new potential customers and advancing sustainability worldwide. Microsoft’s industry-leading sustainable cloud services enable businesses across diverse economic segments to adopt low-carbon business practices and meet their sustainability objectives.
Microsoft broadened its strategic collaborations to emphasize sustainability and partnered with Closed Loop Partners, a United States-based investment company, in 2020 to support its progress toward a more circular economy worldwide. Microsoft allocated $30 million to Closed Loop Partners to help it develop innovative recycling, eWaste collection, and supply chain digitization business models. This partnership allows Microsoft to incorporate a range of insights into its own innovative circular practices and initiatives, especially regarding eWaste, packaging, and waste diversion from landfills. Microsoft Cloud services are approximately 98% more carbon efficient and almost 93% more energy efficient than traditional on-premises enterprise data centers.
Maksym Beznosiuk, Best Practices Research Analyst, Frost & Sullivan, said, “Microsoft works on increasing the energy efficiency of its operational practices, information technology, equipment, and data center infrastructure. Specifically, it applies multi-tenancy, occupying servers with different user types and a vast user base with various demand patterns. Such load diversity minimizes overall fluctuations, makes loads more predictable, and leads to less electricity consumption per useful output.”
Microsoft works closely with suppliers on energy specifications, server design, and other IT equipment, paving the way towards a substantial reduction in electricity consumption as well as total life cycle emissions. Additionally, the company utilizes various measurement techniques to evaluate power usage effectiveness and the ratio of overall electricity consumption at the data center facility to the electricity used by the IT hardware. The company applied advanced infrastructure technologies at its hyper-scale data centers to lower electricity requirements for cooling, power conditioning, and lighting. Moreover, Microsoft intends to source 100% of its energy supply from zero-carbon resources on grids where the company operates by 2030. Microsoft is one of the largest renewable energy purchasers in the world; therefore, its large-scale sustainability actually helps customers passively reduce their own emissions while driving overall market demand at a speed and scale that brings a carbon-negative society into view.
“The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability also supports the transition to more effective carbon reporting and reduction, enabling organizations to record, report, and minimize their environmental impact through automated data connections and actionable insights. The solution enables flexibility, transparency, sustainability, and efficiency in operations, costs, resource reuse, and sustainable performance,” said Fredrick Royan, Vice President – Sustainability and Circular Economy, Frost & Sullivan.
Microsoft’s Cloud for Sustainability solution quickly and effectively assesses and reports CO2 emissions and enables accurate, automated carbon reporting to help organizations understand their CO2 impact and ensure compliance with increasingly stringent environmental standards. And the company’s Circular Centers process decommissioned cloud servers and hardware, and sort, and intelligently channel the components and equipment to optimize reuse or repurpose. The goal is to reuse 90% of its cloud computing hardware by 2025.
With its industry-leading sustainability, circularity solutions in global cloud services, and ability to capture a higher market share, Microsoft earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2022 Global Company of the Year Award for sustainability and circularity in the cloud services industry.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents a Company of the Year award to the organization that demonstrates excellence in growth strategy and implementation in its field. The award recognizes a high degree of innovation with products and technologies and the resulting leadership in customer value and market penetration.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in various regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analyses, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
