What is less heavy and less real than a cloud? According to Tristan Labaume, founding president of the Green IT alliance, “today is the madness of clouds where everyone puts everything and anything in it”. But “the clouds is not in the clouds, but in the data center », Assures the expert. And companies again and again come up against the same problem in terms of environmental impact: “the manufacture of new equipment to maintain servers and clouds within data centerit’s an impact 80 times greater than the first year of use,” he adds.
If, as assured by Frédéric Bordage, independent expert and founder of Green IT, “the operators of data center have done a remarkable job for fifteen years to reduce electricity consumption”, should we then take advantage of this to store ever more data? It’s a no for Caroline Vateau, “responsible digital” director at Capgemini Invent. “It’s important to manage consumption, to ensure that we manage infobesity, unnecessary storage. It’s not Versailles, what! On the model of the management of its energy consumption, we must do the same in the clouds by setting limits. »
Companies therefore face multiple challenges in implementing a policy of digital sobriety, i.e. “reasonable because reasoned use of digital technology”, according to Frédéric Bordage. The slow techthe eco-design of digital services, the search for a clouds responsible, so many concepts that are integrated step by step into the governance of companies.
The construction of infrastructures, the sinews of war
“You haven’t missed your life at 40 if you don’t have a connected watch! insists Frédéric Bordage. We must agree to go back down to second class, promote re-employment and think about digital sobriety ”. While it is often associated with constraint, sobriety is nevertheless creative and allows positive solutions to emerge.
Caroline Vateau, who recently worked on the public project Nega Byte, a benchmark for measuring the environmental impact of digital services and proposing areas for improvement, draws a clear conclusion: “there is a real reflection to be had on the workstation and on the equipment, on the way to make them last as long as possible, on how to postpone software obsolescence”. The expert therefore assures that companies must make choices, carefully select what is essential in digital services and make them work “as economically as possible”. In a word, think about the eco-design of their digital services. “And create them in a very sober way,” adds Frédéric Bordage.
The slow tech at the service of digital sobriety
As for the start-up WeatherForce, based in Toulouse, which offers a rainfall forecasting service for farmers, the slow tech has profoundly transformed the way of working. Frédéric Bordage, who intervened in the context of a collective operation set up by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Hérault and Ademe, called “Green Concept”, tells how a smartphone equipped with 4G, the equipment needed to access it, we switched to a 2G phone receiving SMS.
“In order for this service to exist in emerging countries not equipped with 4G and also to ecodesign it, we worked on a pilot village in Côte d’Ivoire,” explains the expert. Smartphones and state-of-the-art networks have been replaced by a system with two solutions: on the one hand, sending a text message to a mobile that may be 20 years old, and on the other, to circumvent the 30% illiteracy in the country, the teacher receives the SMS and writes the information on the board, which is then transmitted to the parents who work the land when the children come home from school”.
Frédéric Bordage is delighted: “We do not modify the impacts already created, we avoid them”. And for good reason, thanks to this solution slow tech, all dispensable digital has been removed. “It is the perfect example of a use green where the high tech is used only in Toulouse for the forecasting supercomputer, which makes it possible to know precisely and reliably when the rain is going to fall, and thus to sow and harvest at the right time, by limiting the use of inputs, namely fertilizers , pesticides… “.
The operators clouds soon consultants in digital sobriety?
Making an inventory of needs, reasoning about the stored data, “it also means learning to resize and update the applications that are migrated to the cloud”, insists Caroline Vateau. The ease of access to clouds is a bias for companies – as for individuals for that matter – who feel they don’t need to choose. “By pressing a button, everyone can have access to computer resources, without interruption of service, copied to several places, abounds the expert. However, if the data center have made great progress in terms of energy efficiency, operators still have work to do regarding the limitation of stocks and above all the circularity of the components they use”.
On the model of energy suppliers, Caroline Vateau even suggests that cloud providers eventually advise their customers in the choice of their storage offer. “Why not take advantage of their experience and visibility to support companies in reducing their environmental footprint, and theirs at the same time?” ” If the practice is marginal today, the reason is obviously financial: “the more a company consumes, the more it is interesting for the cloud provider », she admits, confused.
For Frédéric Bordage, the effort must go even further. “How is it possible that the cloud providers do not show transparency on their environmental impacts?, he protests. They only deal with greenhouse gas emissions, which in France constitute only 11% of the impact of digital technology. Which means they evade almost 90% of their impact. Either they’re dumb or they’re pretending.