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Introduction: a new era of sustainable cloud transformation

Sustainable innovations help organizations stay competitive, manage costs, and build resilience amid rapid shifts in markets and climate risk, all key drivers in moving to the cloud.

Microsoft considers sustainability to be a core value, as demonstrated by our identification and implementation of opportunities to reduce energy, water, and waste consumption in datacenters; however, our impact doesn’t stop at our cloud operations. Microsoft Azure provides dedicated tools to help plan, manage, and continually optimize the carbon footprint of cloud workloads; from migration planning (comparing on-premises vs. cloud environmental impact) to ongoing management and optimization of Azure resources for minimal emissions.

Today, we are excited to announce two new sustainability-focused capabilities that empower you to make this journey end-to-end:

• Sustainability in Azure Migrate business case – Now in public preview: Estimate and compare on-premises vs. Azure emissions when building your cloud migration strategy.


• Carbon optimization in Azure – Now generally available: Continuously monitor the carbon emissions of your Azure workloads with granular data and actionable recommendations to gain insights that help you reduce costs in the Azure portal.

Let’s explore how they work across each phase of your cloud journey.

Improve your sustainability profile through cloud migration

Organizations analyze a variety of factors when considering their migration to the cloud, and potential improvements to their sustainability profiles are one of those factors. Azure Migrate, Microsoft’s migration and modernization platform, now incorporates sustainability considerations into migration planning. These new capabilities are designed for IT infrastructure teams, cloud architects, and project managers responsible for datacenter transformation. They’ll also aid financial decision-makers and sustainability leads who need to understand the environmental return on investment. By speaking the language of both cost savings and carbon savings, Azure Migrate gives insights to help build consensus across stakeholders evaluating how their move to Azure could benefit both the business and the planet.

Here are key capabilities provided for sustainable migration planning:

• Application-Aware Assessments: Azure Migrate can assess entire multi-server applications as a single unit. This means you can identify and group all dependent servers, databases, and resources that make up an application and evaluate them together.


• Integrated Sustainability Metrics: The new sustainability assessment (in preview) in Azure Migrate business case adds carbon emissions analysis to your migration assessments. When sizing up an on-premises environment versus Azure you can now get estimates of the potential reduction in carbon footprint from migrating those workloads to Azure. (Note: This capability is being introduced in preview.)


• Enhanced Guidance and User Experience: A refreshed guided user experience walks users through the migration process step by step. The workflow is organized into clear stages, from creating your migration project, to assessment (with a choice of first- or third-party assessment tools per workload type), to migration execution.

Optimize cloud emissions with carbon optimization in Azure

Once you’ve migrated and your workloads are running in the cloud, continuous optimization is important for empowering you to maximize efficiency and minimize underutilized resources. This is where carbon optimization in Azure comes in.

Now generally available, carbon optimization in Azure is accessible directly in the Azure Portal (simply search for “carbon optimization” in the portal). It surfaces emissions insights and recommendations right where you manage your cloud resources, making it easy for developers, IT professionals, and FinOps teams to incorporate sustainability into daily cloud operations. Here are key features that help you manage and reduce emissions:

• Granular emissions visibility: Carbon optimization in Azure offers detailed data on carbon emissions from your Azure usage, segmented by subscription, resource group, individual resource, type, and location. This transparency is essential for businesses incorporating IT emissions into their decisions.


• Built-in portal experience with RBAC: The carbon optimization dashboard is integrated into the Azure management portal, requiring no separate setup. It supports Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), ensuring that only authorized roles (Owner, Contributor, Reader, or Carbon Optimization Reader) can access emissions data for a subscription, safeguarding sensitive sustainability information.


• Data export and APIs: Carbon optimization allows exporting emissions metrics (to CSV) and accessing them via REST APIs for integration into reporting tools, dashboards, or sustainability systems. This enables holistic analysis by combining carbon and cost data.


• Optimization recommendations: Perhaps the most impactful feature, carbon optimization in Azure works in tandem with Azure Advisor to analyze resource utilization and provide AI-driven recommendations to reduce carbon emissions. The primary focus of these recommendations is eliminating underutilization.

Companies can regularly review their dashboard to track progress towards sustainability targets just as they use other Azure dashboards to track cost, uptime, or security posture. This helps turn sustainability into a day-to-day practice, rather than a yearly audit.

From efficient migration to continuous optimization

Consider a sample scenario: An enterprise plans to migrate on-premises apps to Azure. They find that using Azure can cut carbon emissions by, say, 50% due to efficient infrastructure, adding to the migration proposal’s appeal. The team migrates the apps, grouping components for efficiency. In the cloud, they activate carbon optimization in Azure. The carbon optimization dashboard shows some VMs are underutilized at night, prompting the team to right-size and schedule non-critical VMs to shut down during off-peak hours. This further reduces emissions and costs with minimal effort, tracked in the dashboard for visibility.

Together, sustainability in Azure Migrate business case and carbon optimization in Azure create an end-to-end loop for sustainable cloud computing that ensures that sustainability isn’t a one-time consideration but a core part of your cloud journey.

As you plan your next steps in the cloud:

• Evaluate your own cloud migration plans with an eye on sustainability. Work with your licensing team to use the new sustainability in Azure Migrate business case to see how moving to Azure could lower your environmental impact.


• Explore carbon optimization in Azure in the Azure Portal for your existing Azure resources. Even if you’ve been running in Azure for years, you might be surprised by the insights this tool provides. Get started in the Azure Portal today. 

Together, let’s make every cloud investment an investment in a sustainable future.