Power Platform | Pave the way for a sustainable future

In my first article I set the scene to start sharing some thoughts and ideas around Power Platform and its role for a sustainable future. Reading across this, you recognized there´s actually two roles within:

• Direct – your company using Power Platform as a cloud service
• Indirect – Power Platform components being used as cohesive technology to build or improve your Cloud for Sustainability

When asked for benefits about the direct role you should know that in general using cloud computing is significantly more energy- and carbon-efficient than traditional on-premises datacenter solutions. In other words: Using a Power Platform Power Apps applications for instance is more energy- and carbon-efficient than using an app that is hosted and deployed through an on-premises datacenter. If you want to read more about this, here´s a study.

But with great flexibility also comes responsibility – using cloud services also means to be challenged with estimating your procured Microsoft cloud-based datacenter emissions within your value chain. For Microsoft (and many of its cloud customers), supply chain carbon emissions are much larger than those from direct operations and more difficult to quantify.

To accurately quantify its supply chain emissions, a company must collect information from its suppliers, including Microsoft when using Power Platform. Suppliers must then calculate their product specific operational emissions (which might include their supply chain as well). As this process unfolds, companies will have more information to help make better, longer-term decisions. Sounds like a complex and not so easy task? That guides us to the indirect role of Power Platform. Are you ready for it?

Microsoft developed a new methodology to improve its estimation of its own cloud value chain emissions and allocates those emissions effectively to customers. The process aggregates those emissions to the datacenter and region levels, and allocates them to customers based on their cloud usage by month and
region. This methodology enables Microsoft to provide customers with their cloud-based emissions totals based on their specific hardware profiles, datacenters, and reporting month. The access to the results of this methodology available for Azure and M365 customers is granted through the Emissions Impact Dashboard.

A benefit: Conventional financial modeling fails to account for procurement changes unless there is a
direct spending change – in fact, under the financial model, spending more to achieve reductions can increase a company’s apparent emissions.

Additionally, as we can see from above visual Power Platform is used as cohesive technology to build Microsoft´s Cloud for Sustainability – an extensible software-as-a-service solution that helps you record, report, and reduce your organization’s environmental impact through automated data connections and actionable insights. Think of it as an easy entry to address the typical CSO challenges of

• Multiple/diverse data sources needs to be taken into account
• No data architecture that makes collecting information a challenge
• Poor quality data that needs manual work to enhance it to a level that fits requirements
• Inconsistent reporting metrics that not only makes Scope 1, 2 a challenge – adding Scope 3 makes it complex and high effort.

Furthermore, you could think of a breakdown model of Power Platform components that I outlined in above visual. If adding the examples given from Azure side (Data Lake and Synapse) you could think of the Powerhouse of tools that helps you pave the way for a sustainable future.

In other words in the indirect role, the composite of low-code/no-code-, automation-, visualization-, analytics- and AI-driven predictive calculation as a platform provides an easy access to a complex task. We are nature and nature is us. Let´s drive the change. Until then,…