Across the globe, organizations are united by one shared priority: sustainability. While committing to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives is simply the right thing to do to preserve our planet for future generations, businesses face additional pressure to prioritize sustainability via regulations, expectations from investors, and consumer preferences. Since 2019, thousands of companies have committed to achieving net-zero emissions. More than 9,000 organizations have pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, and that number is expected to continue growing year over year.
At Cloudera, we’re proud to help enterprises meet their ESG goal of carbon neutrality through smarter, data-driven technology decisions. We also practice what we preach by driving our own journey toward carbon neutrality. As we celebrate Earth Day, we’re highlighting the ways our platform empowers customers to operate sustainably, efficiently, and responsibly.
Why ESG Matters More Than Ever
ESG initiatives are reshaping industries and becoming integral to corporate strategy and operations. Energy consumption is a key focus area for vendors and consumers alike:
Data centers use about 4.4% of the world’s electricity today, and that will only increase as demand grows. This substantial usage has placed the infrastructure providers under increased scrutiny, and it has compelled companies to adopt sustainable practices to mitigate their environmental impact.
To meet the soaring power demands driven by AI, cloud vendors are investing billions in advanced energy infrastructure—from small modular nuclear reactors to undersea cable networks—to help offset the ecological impact.
Simultaneously, regulatory bodies are enforcing greater transparency and accountability. For example, the European Union’s (EU) Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mandates that large companies, including non-EU enterprises, share clear details about their environmental and social impact.
Sustainability has emerged as a significant competitive differentiator. Consumers and investors increasingly evaluate companies based on their ESG commitments and performance. Organizations that proactively integrate sustainable practices are positioning themselves for long-term success.
Cloudera's Role in Supporting ESG
As ESG becomes mission critical, enterprises must evaluate their vendor relationships to ensure that their technology partners can support their enterprise sustainability initiatives.
Cloudera’s true hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI empowers you to make informed infrastructure choices that align with your unique ESG initiatives. The solutions you build with our platform can help you lower your environmental impact while delivering high performance and driving business growth.
Here’s how Cloudera enables sustainability through data, analytics, and AI:
Lowering Emissions with a True Hybrid, Cloud-Native Platform
Our true hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI enables businesses to manage data across their on-premises infrastructure and any cloud environment. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the most efficient, and often lowest carbon, infrastructure for each workload. It also reduces infrastructure sprawl and aligns IT resource usage directly with business demand—a powerful step toward achieving ESG targets.
An additional component that drives sustainability is the cloud-native elasticity of our platform. Enterprises can scale resources dynamically, up when needed and down to zero when idle, which ensures they use only what they need. For example, PTT OR, a leading energy company in Thailand, uses Cloudera’s hybrid platform to optimize its supply chain and reduce fuel delivery routes, leading to lower energy consumption and a reduced carbon footprint.
Reducing Carbon Footprint Through High-Density Storage
Cloudera Object Store, powered by Apache Ozone, makes data storage more sustainable. With the capability to scale to more than 10 billion objects per cluster, Ozone significantly reduces physical hardware requirements, energy use, and carbon emissions. And it supports larger drive sizes, resulting in higher storage density compared to systems like HDFS.
Many of our large enterprise customers already leverage Cloudera Object Store to collectively manage more than an exabyte of data and consolidate infrastructure, optimize resources, and minimize environmental impact. That is what makes Cloudera Object Store a powerful storage choice for enterprises committed to advancing their ESG goals.
Lowering Power Consumption with Energy-Efficient Compute
By leveraging energy-efficient ARM processors like AWS Graviton and AMD, Cloudera helps enterprises reduce their power usage significantly, without sacrificing performance. Switching to ARM processors can save businesses between 20%-90% on infrastructure costs while lowering their carbon footprint.
Reducing Resource Waste with Intelligent Data Lifecycle Management
Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer automates complex data lifecycle management tasks for Apache Iceberg, including compaction and table cleanup operations, making queries more performant and efficient while reducing resource consumption. This automation supports enterprise ESG goals by minimizing energy usage, hardware requirements, and ultimately, carbon footprints.
Driving Continuous Efficiency Through Operational Insights
Cloudera Observability provides unparalleled insights into enterprise operations. By highlighting inefficiencies and wasteful energy consumption, Cloudera Observability enables continuous improvement for sustainability metrics.
Enhancing ESG Transparency with Automated Data Lineage
Cloudera’s recent acquisition of Octopai strengthens our support for ESG transparency with powerful, automated metadata management. Octopai’s AI-driven solutions provide clear, real-time insights into data lineage, which makes ESG reporting more accurate and reliable. This helps businesses avoid compliance issues and ensures their sustainability claims are real and auditable.
Social Responsibility and Data-Driven Inclusion
ESG goes beyond the environment to include social impact. Cloudera’s data tools help customers track and improve workforce management by offering visibility into diversity, fair pay, hiring, and employee satisfaction. These insights help businesses improve socially and environmentally, while promoting fairness and inclusion for everyone.
Looking Ahead: Our Commitment to ESG Innovation
Sustainability is a journey and, at Cloudera, we're constantly innovating to further support our customers' ESG strategies. Our future initiatives include even deeper integrations with sustainable technologies, enhanced automation for ESG reporting and compliance, and growing and expanding partnerships that help enterprises meet and exceed global ESG standards.
Building a Sustainable, Data-Driven Future
For Earth Day, we at Cloudera want to reiterate our commitment to our customers’ growth as well as protect our collective future. By leveraging data and innovative technology, enterprises can meet sustainability goals without compromising their operational or business objectives.
Let’s shape a greener future together. Reach out today to see how Cloudera can power your ESG goals, or click here to start a free trial!
