Microsoft’s “Cloud for Sustainability” is here (released June 2022) in the guise of Microsoft Sustainability Manager – a new tool/platform aimed to help organisations with their journey to net zero and bolstering their ESG (environmental, social, and governance) capabilities.
Sustainability & ESG is a growing focus for business leaders across the globe and this is just the start of Microsoft’s plans in this area. Sustainability Manager focus on several areas:
Unify data intelligence
Build a sustainable IT infrastucture
Reduce environmental impact of operations
Create sustainable value chains
What does it do?
It helps organisations track their emissions across the business, automate the collection and analysis, and present it to the business via analytics and dashboards. It covers Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions – for those of you not familiar with those (as I wasn’t until relatively recently), here’s a quick overview:
Scope 1
Emissions from sources that an organisation owns/controls like fuel used in company vehicles
Scope 2
Emissions indirectly caused by a company when energy it purchases/uses is produced. An example being the emissions from the generation of electricity that is used to power electric company vehicles.
Scope 3
Emissions not covered by the above but where a company is indirectly responsible across the supply chain such as using/disposing of products from suppliers.
I used this page from the National Grid to get the above definitions.
Scope 3 emissions can make up the bulk of emissions for an organisation but they are also the hardest to reduce.
Pricing & licensing
It is priced at $4,000 (USD) per tenant per month – although Microsoft do point out that additional capabilities added to the product may incur additional charges in the future. That price includes Dataverse capacity which is capped at:
- Database – 10GB per month
- File – 20GB per month
- Log – 2GB per month
and if additional capacity is needed, add-on licenses will need to be acquired.
It is available in 32 languages and can deployed from the US and Europe.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 