Sustainability review
Make sure your website is climate-smart
If you want to take clear steps towards sustainability and strengthen the image of your company as an environmentally conscious company, then you should do an Epinova Sustainability X-ray (sustainability review). Join us and make a difference!
It's easy to think that by digitizing and moving things to the cloud, we make things climate-friendly and cheap. So then we can easily increase the number of marketing mailings and publish lots of reels on social media. We earn more money and we are climate-smart. No trees are allowed to die for our ads.
But is that really true? No, or rather no. IT is the sector that is currently increasing its carbon dioxide emissions dramatically. Even before the generative AI revolution, IT accounted for a larger climate footprint than the global aviation industry.
What can you do to reduce your digital climate footprint?
There are a number of different things you can do to reduce your website's carbon footprint. Some things you can do yourself, others you may need help with. At Epinova, we always strive to build as sustainable and accessible solutions as possible, and we are happy to help ensure the quality of your website from a sustainability perspective.
Website performance and technical solutions
Modern websites built on Microsoft's technical platform .NET Core are much "lighter" technically and thus consume less server capacity. Ensuring that the web solution is continuously upgraded to the latest technology is an important part of good sustainability. Another thing that can affect a lot is how different types of technical solutions on the website work and are used, such as image management, building pages/templates and different types of AI services. Measures to reduce a web solution's climate footprint can thus be anything from making minor adjustments to technical solutions to upgrading or rebuilding.
Green hosting
Moving your operations home to a more local "green hosting" in Sweden, can have several advantages from a sustainability perspective and when it comes to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Here are some of the arguments that are often highlighted:
- Increased share of renewable energy
Sweden has a high proportion of renewable energy in electricity production. We also have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt hour produced in Europe, thanks to power from water, wind and, to some extent, biofuels. Placing your hosting where it can be powered by renewable energy can help reduce overall CO2 emissions. - Better energy efficiency
Sweden has a cool climate, which is beneficial for data centers because it reduces the need for energy-intensive cooling systems. This leads to lower energy consumption and thus lower carbon dioxide emissions. - Improved data governance and compliance
By moving data storage to Sweden, your business may be able to achieve better compliance with EU rules and directives, including GDPR, depending on your business's specific requirements and needs for data protection and security. - Supporting local green IT initiatives
By choosing "green hosting" in Sweden, you support local initiatives/companies and infrastructures that are focused on sustainable development, which in the long run can contribute to a more sustainable global IT industry.
Switching to green hosting is a relatively simple measure that gives immediate results. It is important to point out here that it is not only about "traditional" hosting, but also about moving the operation of cloud-based services to Sweden. But what else is it that affects your website's climate footprint?
First step towards a climate-smart website
To keep track of what exactly you need to think about when it comes to your website's digital climate footprint, we offer Epinova's Sustainability X-ray, a sustainability review that includes several different parts. We always adapt our efforts based on your needs and where you are in your sustainability journey. With various tools and our solid experience in solution reviews, we do the following:
- We measure and make an analysis of how your website delivers in terms of climate impact. We also go through the code to see what improvement opportunities there are.
- We develop suggestions for measures, what you can do in the short term (low-hanging fruit) and in the slightly longer term.
- We introduce you to how you can measure and follow up and develop suggestions for a measurement plan.
- We give you advice and training on how you can work forward, and we help you with facts and arguments to be able to implement the efforts.
Epinova's Sustainability X-ray provides you with a basis for your future work with your website. It can serve as input for smaller, ongoing measures as well as for planning in the slightly longer term.
Market signal on sustainability
Businesses that take clear and measurable steps towards sustainability can strengthen their brand. More and more people will also be subject to increased requirements for sustainability reporting, so starting the work to reduce your digital climate footprint provides more benefits than the obvious ones – contributing to a better future for all of us.