In May this year, business and technology resilience company Databarracks was certified carbon neutral by Carbon Footprint.
Co-founder Peter Groucutt commented, ‘We deliver our services from the public cloud and from private data centres which, as massive energy users, have a profound environmental impact. It is important for us to minimise the impact of our operations as much as we can.
‘We have built our business on managing backup and disaster recovery for our clients. Now, we can provide them with a carbon neutral service.’
He added, ‘It is much worse to be at this point in history and not do something. We need to be part of the solution, rather than just part of the problem.
‘There is very little people can do quickly to change their use of technology. Our digital economy and the way we use tech means it is not going to be removed overnight. But if everybody plays a part in reducing the impact of their activities, that is a good thing for us and the planet.’
In a 12 month review of its activities and their carbon impact, the company found that data centres were its biggest source of emissions.
Peter added, ‘In future, we hope to be able to partner with data centres that use carbon neutral power. Next year, we will be switching to carbon neutral power supplies in our London office.’
The company has invested in a wide range of offsetting initiatives so far. In future, it plans to invest directly with more select projects. When choosing new suppliers, Databarracks reviews their carbon reduction initiatives to help offset where possible. For those that already offset, like AWS and Microsoft, it offsets further to double the impact.
Carbon zero means reducing emissions to an absolute minimum and offsetting the remainder, rather than simply offsetting them.
One of the challenges of the review has been calculating the carbon footprint of services for individual customers. This is in part due to the difficulty of attribution on a shared customer platform.
In future, and with more detailed data from suppliers, Databarracks will be able to provide customers with the most accurate information possible.