Digitalised operations and the cloud-based factory.
We’ve all heard about the financial and operational benefits of Industry 4.0 and IoT. All those sensors. All that data. All that predictive maintenance. All that digital twinning.
When done by using the cloud in the right way, it can also drive down energy usage and carbon emissions.
Avoid a big sustainability risk.
There’s a big sustainability risk we see with manufacturers on Industry 4.0 journeys: they end up driving digitalisation by expanding their data centre footprint.
When you do it this way, you can 100% end up with a successful project from an IT perspective. But it can backfire from a sustainability perspective – because it comes with a high CO2 cost.
Use a cloud-native approach to digitalisation, and you can optimise energy consumption across the lifecycle:
✔ Your IT runs in the most energy-efficient way (as we saw in the previous section)
✔ You end up with more effective and agile solutions that give you more control over energy use (and emissions) at all stages of production
Expanding your data centre footprint comes with a high CO2 cost.
