Green software products: sustainability as a competitive advantage

Digitalisation has changed our lives in many ways and offers countless advantages. However, with the increasing use of digital solutions, the responsibility to minimise the ecological impact of these technologies is also growing. In particular, technology companies that provide digital products for other companies are faced with the challenge of making their software solutions more sustainable. In this blog post, you will learn why sustainability is essential in the digital value chain and how you can make your software products more environmentally friendly.

The challenge: sustainability in the digital value chain

Those responsible for digital products face a variety of challenges. In addition to the rising costs of operating solutions and the search for new marketing strategies, the focus is increasingly on sustainability indicators. Many companies are already demanding proof of environmental labels or compliance with environmental management systems. However, even if these requirements are not yet in place, this is an opportunity to set yourself apart from your competitors and score points with customers.

The digital sector is responsible for around four per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. In technology companies, around 35 per cent of Scope 2 emissions are attributable to IT. Added to this is the complexity of the digital supply chain: many companies do not even know which hardware is used to operate their applications, let alone the ecological production costs of these.

The solution: sustainable optimisation of digital products

At adesso, we have recognised that emissions from individual software products can be reduced by an average of 32 percent through clever optimisation of applications and operations. The best approach is to avoid environmental impacts and thus costs before they arise. By integrating quality checks into CI/CD or deployment pipelines, the environmental impact of changes to code and infrastructure can be verified. With self-defined rules, changes that lead to more environmental impact can be rejected. This ensures that ecologically and financially costly changes do not even reach production.

For companies that want to go one step further, we recommend defining guidelines. Whether in design, architecture or development, there are many proven best practices for creating digital products that are not only ecologically beneficial but often also lead to more robust, maintainable and cost-efficient software solutions. By developing and introducing individual guidelines that are tailored to the tech stack and the day-to-day challenges of the organisation, employees are given orientation to help them contribute to achieving sustainability goals every day.

Practical insight: overcoming the hurdles

In discussions with those responsible in companies, five main obstacles to making digital services more sustainable emerge:

• Measuring environmental impact: Measuring the environmental impact of software is challenging. There are various tools and methods, but they often produce different results. It is important to choose a consistent and comprehensible method that is tailored to the specific requirements of the company.
• Lack of transparency due to unverified marketing claims: Suppliers often create a lack of transparency through unverified marketing claims. An independent review of this information is therefore essential to avoid greenwashing and to make truly sustainable decisions.
• Lack of in-house expertise: There is often a lack of expertise to manage corresponding initiatives. Training and building internal know-how are crucial here. Working with external experts can also help to close knowledge gaps.
• Complex dependencies: There are many complex dependencies and trade-offs between hardware, software and networks. A holistic view and optimisation of these components is necessary to achieve sustainable improvements.
• Difficulty of performance evaluation: It is often difficult to benchmark one's own performance. Comparison with industry standards and best practices can provide valuable insights and help to improve one's own positioning.

adesso has been helping its customers to meet precisely these challenges for several years. We are familiar with the software tools available for measuring sustainability and their strengths and weaknesses. We help to avoid greenwashing and to independently evaluate information from suppliers. With expertise gained from several projects in this area, we help to launch initiatives and also have benchmark data in some industries and sectors to assess our customers' performance.

Conclusion: sustainability as a competitive advantage

The sustainability of digital products will become increasingly important in the future, especially for technology companies. It is not only about cost efficiency, but above all about positioning in the market. In order to be able to make reliable statements about the sustainability of the services offered, a holistic view of the topic is required. Starting with measuring the status quo, optimising input factors such as cloud services and third-party services, and building continuous monitoring and optimising the system itself.

We have extensive expertise and experience and work with technology organisations every day to prepare them for a sustainable future. Do you have a great digital product? Great, we'll help you make it even greener!

Let's pave the way to a sustainable digital future together. Contact us and find out how we can help you make your digital products more environmentally friendly and thus create real added value for your customers.

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