This is a guest blog post by Georgie Barrat, tech journalist and presenter of The Gadget Show. 

As work went remote for many last March, in amongst the uncertainty, worry, and panic, something amazing happened. Shoals of fish returned to the waters of Venice, Britain’s air became cleaner as road traffic fell by more than 70 percent, and from space you could see smog belts dissolving from across the globe. Our planet had a moment to catch its breath. While this change played out before us, we too found a different rhythm of life.

And here we are a year and half on, fully immersed in a new hybrid-work revolution. A recent report by McKinsey estimated that 25 percent of workers in the Western world work from home three to five days a week. That is four times more people working remotely than before the pandemic. What analysts predicted would take years for businesses to achieve with flexible working happened virtually overnight.

The advantages of working from anywhere, of being able to connect via video calls to people from across the globe, or collaborate on cloud-based work solutions are too long to list in this blog post. These technologies have opened a new way of living and working. But something that we rarely take a moment to consider is the environmental impact of remote working.

While lockdowns allowed some parts of the planet to heal, our new way of working is leaving behind a different carbon footprint. Every video call, stream, high definition graphic, or download requires datacentres, electricity and water. When you take into consideration that broadband usage in the UK doubled over the course of 2020, then you start to appreciate the extra resources that these datacentres are using to keep the WFH machine whirring. We are already at the point that datacentres are outstripping the aviation industry as carbon producers.

So where does this leave businesses? They can’t bulk against the changing tide of remote working nor can they ignore the pressing need to prioritise their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies. Instead thinking about the environmental impact of their cloud usage and the technologies that they use, should be high-up on their agenda. Unlike the way we think about recycling or travel, it’s easy to assume that what happens in our virtual worlds has no repercussions on the real world, but this is far from the case. This is about fine-tuning every aspect of your business so that it hits those sustainability targets and lets your organisation become the change that the world so desperately needs.

An easy win when it comes to reducing your cloud carbon footprint is to work with a hyperscale cloud provider. This is because these providers lead with an energy-efficient design from the onset and are committed to offsetting their carbon emissions. Some of these hyperscale players are already carbon neutral, whilst others are pledging to power their operations with 100 percent renewable energy in the next few years.

Citrix’s latest research shows that companies have come on leaps and bounds with their ESG strategies recently. Nearly two-thirds of IT leaders interviewed now see their enterprise as “advanced” in their ESG journeys, using a combination of cloud migration, innovative carbon emissions tracking and regular staff training.

Despite this though, only half are running their data and applications with one of the hyperscale players. If we can get more organisations signing up to these greener cloud providers, then it will help move the needle in ensuring sustainable practices are rolled out organisation-wide.

As COP26 has so clearly emphasised, businesses need to streamline all aspects of their operations and considering the impact of their digital pollution footprint is an important aspect of this. If we harness the power of technology correctly, it can ultimately be an asset, not a drain, in the fight against global warming.