Kainos: Digital needs to be greener #techUKDigitalPS
Digital is not clean or "green" by default. It has an impact on the world around us. It has a carbon footprint. It uses a substantial amount of energy and creates waste. And demand for internet services continues to increase. Digital can be greener.
The UK can be a green leader
The UK is already a global leader in digital government, transforming its services with digital and data. It is now much easier to engage with government than ever before with its 75+ digital services.
Public sector has an opportunity to lead the world in greener digital services. Its NetZero commitments include 50 references to "smart energy", "smart meters" and "smart systems" so there are plenty of opportunities for technology to help reduce carbon emissions.
Each government department has also made specific carbon emission reductions as part of its Greening Government Commitments. One of these 7 commitments is "reducing environmental impacts from ICT and digital". Given this there is an urgent need for the tech industry to start to reduce the impact of its digital services.
Collaborating to become greener
The tech industry cannot do this on its own, it needs to collaborate with government departments to succeed. This will spread good practice and increase the skill level for green software. But what key actions should we embrace to make digital greener?
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Reducing electricity demand. By reducing the energy demands of services, we will see reduced carbon emissions, reduced heat and leave more electricity supply available for other basic human needs.
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Using more renewable energy. By scheduling cloud compute to run when the renewable energy mix is higher for the data centre electricity supply, digital services can reduce their carbon emissions. The Green Software Foundation's Carbon Aware SDK calculates this for you.
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Moving to cloud. Kainos helped Companies House achieve a substantial reduction in operational carbon emissions by migrating to AWS and Azure clouds. Caveat: carbon calculation is a rough estimate using cloud spend.
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Reducing waste. Digital services can reduce data waste with stricter controls to only store and process valuable data. And they can reduce device waste by reducing the minimum spec for devices.
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Reducing consumption. GreenOps aka FinOps allows organisations to continuously optimise their cloud spend. These efficiency gains will reduce demand and so digital services energy and cost.
The new cyber security?
The Technology Code of Practice tells us to "Make your technology sustainable". To achieve this in practice it needs to get a similar level of priority as cyber security and data privacy. Let's imagine what this will look like by 2030 if it did:
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Software engineers and product owners will understand and speak the same language of green software services.
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Product owners will ensure sustainability is in every product backlog.
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Sustainability will be a standard non-functional requirement from discovery phase onwards.
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Digital services will be routinely measured using tooling for energy usage, operational carbon emissions and waste. Digital services will have a sustainability score.
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Artificial intelligence assistants will recommend optimisations to software systems to make them even more efficient and lower impact on the environment.
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Most government services will have been migrated to clouds or data centres that use renewable energy.
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Government departments will promote transparency and lead by publishing sustainability scores for its digital services.
If you want to put this into practice, check out the Green Software Foundation's software pattern catalogue and follow the Kainos Green Software series.
This article was published by Peter Campbell, Director of Green Software, Kainos, Member of the Data and AI Committee at techUK. Learn more about this author here.
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