Intro:

Recently, I had the privilege of joining a panel discussion focused on how cloud technology is enabling organizations to accelerate their sustainability journeys. The session brought together diverse perspectives—from business transformation to technical implementation—and highlighted how platforms like Microsoft Sustainability Manager (MSM) and the Sustainability Data Solutions Framework (SDSF) are helping bridge the gap between ESG ambition and measurable action.

Conversations:

Here are some of the key questions we explored, along with insights from both the Business Change Lead and Technical Implementation Lead perspectives:

1. How do you see the role of cloud technology evolving in the context of global sustainability efforts?
   Business Viewpoint: Cloud enables businesses to quickly adopt solutions and establish a common language across stakeholders. It helps capture data to understand our current state and use that data to drive impactful decisions.
   Technical Viewpoint: Microsoft’s pre-built solutions and R&D accelerate our journey. SDSF allows us to ingest, normalize, and analyze sustainability data at scale. Once we start capturing data, we can focus our energy where it matters most to achieve Net Zero.

2. How important is collaboration between departments in achieving sustainable growth through cloud?
   Business Viewpoint: It’s essential to create a unified language around sustainability across functions like CSRD, finance, and operations. This requires revisiting processes and aligning teams across geographies.
   Technical Viewpoint: While the business change team leads the process transformation, we focus on enabling technology and showcasing what’s possible with new features.

3. How has Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability helped your organization turn ESG goals into outcomes?
   Business Viewpoint: MSM and SDSF helped us shift from static ESG reporting to dynamic, real-time dashboards. We now track progress monthly instead of annually.
   Technical Viewpoint: For metrics not covered out-of-the-box, we built a custom data collection wrapper using Power Platform to extend MSM’s capabilities.

4. What is your thought process on selecting the right infrastructure for carbon impact?

Technical viewpoint:
Hosting: Prioritize data centers with high PUE ratings and renewable energy. Use serverless architecture and CDNs to reduce emissions.
Data Storage: Avoid data hoarding. Implement green data handling, archival strategies, and optimize data payloads.
Workload Design: Schedule compute-heavy tasks in green data centers or during off-peak hours. Educate users on energy trade-offs.
The Microsoft Sustainability Dashboard helps us identify where to focus efforts to reduce IT’s carbon footprint.

1. What are key challenges in aligning technical solutions with business priorities for impact and ROI?
   Business Viewpoint: Translating ESG metrics into financial language is a challenge. We worked with process leads to link sustainability KPIs to cost savings and risk reduction.
   Technical Viewpoint: Integrating legacy systems and ensuring data quality are major hurdles. SDSF’s connectors and normalization tools help address these.

2. What advice would you give to industries looking to leverage cloud for sustainable growth?
   Business Viewpoint: Start with a materiality assessment. Use MSM to prioritize and track what matters. Change management and data ownership are key.
   Technical Viewpoint: Focus on automating data collection and building a single source of truth. SDSF helps overcome data silos and inconsistencies.

3. What was your biggest learning from this journey?
   Business Viewpoint: Embedding sustainability into OKRs and tracking them alongside financial KPIs ensures ESG is part of every strategic decision.
   Technical Viewpoint: Being involved in process redesign, performing fit-gap analysis, and contributing to the product roadmap was incredibly rewarding. Watching those contributions reflected in product upgrades was a highlight of the journey. Also the opportunity presented for capabilities which were not present out of the box in the solution, leveraging power platform to build the wrapper Apps to assist data collection was an interesting problem solving exercise

Closing Thoughts

This journey has been a powerful learning experience—especially as a technologist stepping into the world of sustainability. Understanding the challenges, collaborating with business teams, and working closely with Microsoft’s product teams to shape solutions has been both humbling and energizing.

Cloud technology is not just a tool—it’s a catalyst for sustainable transformation. And with platforms like MSM and SDSF, we’re not just imagining a greener future—we’re building it.

Fabric SDSF

MSM solution