Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

 Authored By: Magic Hsu, Director and General Manager for Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong & Macau – Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

Organisations across Asia are feeling the heat. There is increasing pressure to tackle the climate crisis and raise sustainability standards. In response, technology leaders are assessing their business strategies to rewrite the playbook for sustainable business transformation. As it stands, the technology industry is responsible for up to 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, annual electronic waste generation is expected to reach 74.7 metric tonnes by 2030—and 110 metric tonnes by 2050.

The region needs to accelerate action to achieve the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Already, various companies are taking progressive steps to make their business models sustainable. Findings from Bain show that 78% of global investors now place more emphasis on ESG than they did five years ago. This underscores the growing importance of sustainability to investors.

Taking on the Climate Challenge

The good news is companies are hearing this loud and clear. Singapore is leading the pack among Southeast Asian corporations with 100% of businesses surveyed undertaking sustainability reporting in 2021, according to KPMG. While the rest of the region is expected to follow suit, organisations must ensure high-quality sustainability data is accessible for effective decision-making on their path toward net zero transition.

This requires a concerted effort across the technology industry—from providers to end users—to address the environmental crisis. Consumers are also increasingly swayed to support sustainable products, and CEOs are listening. Gartner found 83% of CEOs are driving sustainability programme activities that directly impact short- and long-term value for their organisation.

“Organisations across Asia are feeling the heat. There is increasing pressure to tackle the climate crisis and raise sustainability standards.”

Digital technologies today support the transition and adoption of more sustainable business assets as both an operational and reputational imperative. Managed networking solutions can pull those crucial sustainability levers, which are already acknowledged by organisations as a vital facilitator of financial flexibility and corporate agility. IDC predicts that in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), network-as-a-Service (NaaS) adoption will be pervasive and used by 30% of midsize to large businesses by 2025 to support operational agility and flexibility in their network management. This indicates that companies are increasingly turning their investments to managed service providers to ease network complexity in multi-cloud environments and improve resilience across their digital footprint.

Climate-Conscious Solutions

For businesses to achieve net zero emissions, they must look beyond the emissions produced by their own operations. Additionally, they must delve into the sustainability values of their network suppliers. This insight into what enables effective IT operations to minimise environmental impacts over the product lifecycle leads to understanding the main sustainability attributes on how products are made, operated and utilised.

A network management subscription model provides organisations with cutting-edge, sustainable networks that optimise energy usage by fusing their distinct customers’ insights with the vendor’s breadth and depth of product and solution knowledge. Modern network suppliers can deliver more sustainable IT to customers by applying artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based automation models to identify where the leaks are in your networks that are draining power on both the operational and human capital side.

Carefully considering the environmental impacts of networking throughout the IT supply chain should serve as the foundation for a strong and sustainable managed networking service solution. Certified sustainable vendors enable companies to ensure climate-conscious activities are ingrained at the very top of the supply chain by using a three-pronged approach to efficient IT—energy efficiency, equipment efficiency and resource efficiency.

Tapping into the Circular Economy

Another pathway toward effecting change is how organisations address their growing electronic waste stream. IT asset disposition (ITAD) services centerd around reusing, recycling or disposing of unwanted IT equipment with environmental safeguards are increasingly sought alongside today’s modern network offerings. In fact, 77% of businesses view ITAD assistance and e-waste services as an essential element of a network management offer, according to IDC.

In today’s volatile economy, organisations are working around IT budget constraints while keeping digital transformation a top priority. Modern solutions offer asset decommissioning strategies to maximise technology lifecycles and sustainably reduce waste by upcycling and remarketing idle equipment to give functional assets a second life.

Organisations can add value by embracing circular technology service models to reduce the purchase of non-essential hardware, power and resources and fund sustainability-focused innovations. Modern network management providers empower today’s enterprises and enable them to consolidate multiple functions on a single cloud platform that centrally configures equipment, simplifies IT workflows and empowers workforce productivity.

Digging the Data Goldmine

Over time, new sustainability requirements will be added to the mix and organisations face greater challenges to deliver more comprehensively on their sustainability reporting. This means companies need to access their data goldmine that accurately depicts their performance in tracking sustainability metrics. However, the current talent shortage adds pressure to strained IT teams that are expected to do more with less resources and meet the growing demands of digital transformation.

“Digital technologies today support the transition and adoption of more sustainable business assets as both an operational and reputational imperative. Managed networking solutions can pull those crucial sustainability levers, which are already acknowledged by organisations as a vital facilitator of financial flexibility and corporate agility.”

Over the next 10 years, analysts anticipate that Southeast Asia alone would require USD $2 trillion of investments to drive the sustainability agenda. This presents an opportunity to the region as global ESG assets could surpass USD $53 trillion by 2025. However, the scarcity of high-quality data may deter investors from taking the leap. Modern network management models enable businesses to optimise their IT stacks for access to key data about their energy use, carbon emissions, and end-of-life disposal to improve their sustainability credentials.

Conclusion

Asia is poised for a transition toward sustainability—making ESG top of mind for business leaders today. Organisations have a crucial role to play in bridging the gap between sustainable vendors and consumers looking to adopt sustainable IT.

A modern network offering should reassure customers that an environmental approach to networking is being taken across the entire IT supply chain. By viewing technology as a value-generating corporate asset rather than a tool, organisations can be nimbler in navigating the wave of challenges in attaining digital transformation in today’s dynamic economic landscape. Considering a subscription-based model enables customers to harness sustainable network practices and optimise their IT stacks to create effective environmental offsets for a sustainable future.

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