When Darrell King established PolarSeven a little under ten years ago, PolarSeven sponsored a polar bear to be a constant reminder of the need for climate action. He truly believes that the needs of people, profits and the planet can be balanced, and businesses and communities can benefit.
Now, PolarSeven has started the new year very clear and committed to our vision: to be the first choice for organisations seeking a trusted and experienced partner to use Cloud technology to be more sustainable and successful.
Since we started 10 years ago, our focus has been on enabling our clients to use the Cloud to be sustainable, so that they can operate securely and profitably. This year, we are purposely deepening and broadening our focus to using Cloud solutions to address climate change and support businesses who are also committed to environmental and social issues.
myGreenerPlanet
Polarseven has signed up to myGreenerPlanet, an organisation committed to empowering individuals to have direct involvement in climate action, by investing in a solar farm.
We have offset the power that we use as an organisation, by generating an equivalent amount of completely renewable energy - CleanGreenEnergy - and our small investment will save over 2.7 tonnes of carbon being emitted over the lifetime of the project.
As we grow, we intend to stay ahead of the curve and continue to offset our energy usage by making further investments in our solar farm.
What about our Customers?
There are many ways for a business to offset its carbon footprint and that will depend on the nature of the business - which might be transport intensive, resource intensive, energy intensive etc. But we can certainly help companies address the carbon footprint of the IT resources.
The first step would be to migrate anything that is on premise to the Cloud. Using Cloud resources is so much more energy efficient than old servers.
A corollary to this, is to use a Cloud provider that has committed to a sustainable future like AWS has. AWS are working to reduce their carbon footprint across all business operations seeking to power their operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. As proof of this, and something most people would not be aware of, AWS has signed the single biggest contract from a private company in Australia for long term solar power and is already sourcing from three solar farms across Australia.
The second step would be to complete a Well-Architected review which ensures that your implementation in the Cloud runs to absolute best practice, and is not just secure, reliable, and operationally excellent, but also that it is as efficient, cost optimised and sustainable as it can be.
We have recently aligned ourselves with the 6th Pillar of the Well-Architected Framework which is sustainability.
6th Pillar Practitioners (P6 with p7)
The 6th Pillar - the Sustainability Pillar - is about helping organisations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing. P6 is about efficiency in the Cloud - overall consuming fewer Cloud resources (and hence energy). In practice, the pillar helps developers and cloud architects to:
surface the trade-offs,
highlight patterns and best practices, and
avoid anti-patterns.
PolarSeven has a well documented play book where we:
Identify targets for improvement
Evaluate specific improvements
Prioritise and plan improvements
Test and validate improvements
Deploy changes to production
Measure results and replicate successes
Climate Salad
Climate Salad is an active network to boost climate tech companies, in Australia and New Zealand, with tools, programs, and community support. It’s a network of entrepreneurs who can’t wait for policy, and have taken it upon themselves to launch the climate tech transition now!
It includes a broad range of Climate Tech companies from those developing hydrogen fuel cells, to growing microgreens. Many companies are platform based and that platform, due to its requirements for elasticity, interconnectedness and scalability, invariably lives in the Cloud.
That’s where PolarSeven comes in - we can bring our experience helping companies thrive in the Cloud, to ensure their platforms are Well-Architected, Well-Tuned and scalable from the get-go.
From our perspective it’s a no-brainer for sustainability of business - these are the companies that will be around in the future and so it makes sense to want them as our clients.
B Corp Certification
PolarSeven has an aspiration corporate goal for 2022 of B Corp Certification. B Corp Certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards and verified standards of social and environmental performance.
It focuses on the Five Key Impact areas of: Governance, our employees, our customers and the community and environment. In the same way that we set ourselves the goal to become SOC 2 certified within 12 months, we fully intend to achieve this goal within 12 months and have commenced the registration process.
Summary
It’s a three pronged strategy:
The is Customer responsible for sustainability in the Cloud - that’s where we use the 6th Pillar to help our customers achieve that sustainability.
AWS responsible for sustainability of the Cloud - that’s why we work with AWS exclusively
We’re helping Climate Tech climate tech companies achieve success and sustainability through the Cloud.
If you would like to know more how we can help you be more sustainable in the Cloud, book a free consultation or callback, and our cloud professionals can discuss your unique circumstances and offer advice and solutions that will work for you.
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