Sustainable Cloud Solutions With Wasabi

With sustainability becoming a crucial factor in business operations worldwide, organizations are reevaluating their environmental impact. According to Deloitte's 2024 Sustainability Action Report, 45 percent of tech, media, and telecom companies are preparing for stricter ESG regulations. Wasabi Technologies, a leading cloud storage provider, is at the forefront of helping businesses reduce their carbon footprint. In an exclusive interview with CRNtv, Andrew Smith, director of strategy and market intelligence at Wasabi Technologies, discusses how the company is paving the way for greener infrastructure.

Why is sustainability becoming a critical factor in IT purchase decisions and how is Wasabi responding to this trend?

Andrew: It's a great, great question. I think sustainability is becoming an increasingly important decision-making criteria when it comes to cloud storage purchase decisions. Enterprises or organizations purchasing a cloud infrastructure service want to understand how that service fits into what their corporate sustainability strategy might be or their ESG goals. What's going on with a cloud service provider might be a little bit of a black box in terms of how I measure the impact of that service on my own sustainability goals. I think understanding those measurements are what's driving organizations to have that high priority level of consideration.

Why is Wasabi committed to sustainability importance for its partners and how can it help them meet their own environmental and business goals?

Andrew: We know that this is kind of a need from the market when it comes to choosing a cloud storage provider. Organizations large and small, many of them now have kind of these publicly stated ESG and sustainability goals that they're responsible for. A lot of them need to show measurable progress towards those goals. The goals might change over time, but the key is really, in my mind, measuring progress against those goals. That relates back to what Wasabi is trying to do is give reliable, accurate metrics.

The second key reason is more regulatory oriented. Governing bodies across the world are kind of getting more focused on sustainability metrics, reporting and control. The best example is that the SEC just adopted a new rule in March of this year. This is kind of a North America example requiring some public companies to disclose climate related info. That includes GHG emissions in their financial filings. When we think about measuring GHG emissions, we usually talk about categories in terms of scope one, scope two~~,~~ and scope three. We don't need to get into the details. The point for this conversation is that the SEC is requiring accurate measurements for scope one and scope two emissions. And in the future, that could expand to scope three.

How does Wasabi's carbon calculator work and how can customers use it to estimate the CO2 emissions from their data storage?

Andrew: This is kind of where the rubber meets the road. Anyone can go and look at their potential carbon emissions using Wasabi. There's a calculator that's just a web-based calculator that anyone can use. You put in your storage capacity, you choose your storage region~~,~~ and it'll spit out an estimate for what the emissions will be. That's a great starting point for prospects, partners to understand and give you a ballpark of what does.

What we've added recently is for Wasabi users. If you signed up for the service, your storage data with Wasabi, you can now actually take your bill or your invoice and upload it to a web-based tool. That will give you an exact readout for your usage down to the month or up to a year. That gives you the actual reporting that you need if an organization is using Wasabi and they want to have those metrics on a monthly basis.

For more information on how Wasabi is shaping a sustainable future in cloud storage, visit Wasabi's Sustainability Page.