3 questions to ask your data centre about environmental & social responsibility

Turn a potential sustainability liability into an opportunity for your organisation.

Data centres consume a lot of power – and demand is only growing. In a world rightly concerned about climate change, growing energy requirements can be a liability.

As more customers demand efforts toward a sustainable future, ignoring environmental impact brings risk. That’s especially true in the data centre industry.

With a few actionable steps, data centre decision makers can use their energy purchasing power to be part of the solution.

Here are three questions to ask your data centre provider:

1. Do you publicly report your carbon footprint and energy usage? Here are three questions to ask your data centre provider:

Does your data centre provider report their carbon footprint and energy usage? Transparency is the cornerstone of trust and is a key indicator of a reliable business partner. If they know their carbon footprint and disclose their environmental impacts, they’re probably doing a lot of things right. Putting real data in the public domain is a key differentiator between a good green talk track and real accountability.

2. Do you use renewable energy to power your data centres?

Using green energy to offset energy consumption will go a long way toward meeting your sustainability goals. Green energy is not only good for the planet, it makes business sense: Today, renewable energy is often less expensive than brown power, and sophisticated buyers are negotiating long-term fixed-price or stable-price contracts for energy. This means that going forward, energy costs from companies using renewables are likely to be more stable and offer more reliable pricing than fossil fuels.

Ask your data centre provider where their power comes from and if they make a choice to source high quality renewable energy.

3. Can we get credit for your green energy?

If your data centre provider does use renewable energy, ask if you can get credit for their green power usage. Responsible suppliers will provide documentation so that your company can claim carbon reductions and green power usage in your reporting.

Iron Mountain’s Green Power Pass is the first offering of its kind in the data centre industry. Green Power Pass (“GPP”) is a data centre renewable energy solution that gives customers the ability to include the power they consume at any Iron Mountain data centre as green power in their CDP, RE100, GRI, or other sustainability reporting.

Whether your company's sustainability goals are public commitments or currently being defined, making good choices about energy sourcing can help save money, reduce risks and differentiate data centre suppliers who are doing things well.

As a data centre decision maker asking for green energy from your supplier and helping them recognise the market demand, you become part of the solution to address our environmental and social responsibility challenges.