The climate agenda continues to divide leaders in the financial services industry. While some believe it’s not the job of banks to ensure that companies are adopting sustainable practices, others, like Hiromichi Mizuno, Chief Investment Officer of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, said that it’s imperative for asset managers to support green finance.
Whether it’s the role of financial services (FS) institutions to encourage sustainability or not, there’s undoubtedly a momentum for all to think sustainably as pressure from stakeholders, customers, employees (or all three) increases.
In addition to offering ‘green’ products and services, FS companies can push sustainable operations internally. For example, by investing in digital transformation efforts that optimize processes or by developing a physical infrastructure that contributes to their environmental goals.
The role of digital transformation
According to World Economic Forum, digital transformation will help FS businesses become more sustainable. Flexible data management, automation, and highly agile processes will not only help businesses optimize their workspace to drive value, but also reduce their carbon footprint to ensure sustainable finance.
For instance, investments in AI and IoT can help businesses monitor the performance of endpoints, maximizing uptime and streamlining downtime, creating an energy-efficient ecosystem that only uses energy when needed. Similarly, infrastructures can drive digitization efforts, taking documents in the cloud, populating forms automatically, and dispersing data accordingly without the need for human intervention and, crucially, paper.
These digital transformation initiatives require increasing dependence on Big Data, AI, the cloud, IoT and mobility, and these, in turn, place unprecedented demands on the critical connections that enable them, with data centers taking a lot of the strain.
Maximizing a physical data center infrastructure is therefore paramount to the success of any transformation project. This is because a physical data center that is well designed and intelligently monitored not only enables today’s initiatives in a flexible manner but frees up resources for tomorrow’s efforts.
What’s more, digital transformation can help establish new business models that connect an ecosystem of partners together. For example, Panduit’s partner program provides services so you can deliver the most efficient solutions and superior value to your customers.
A sustainable infrastructure
As well as digital transformation efforts helping to reduce waste, the physical infrastructure itself can contribute to environmental efforts. To be more sustainable, FS institutions must use more renewable energy, reduce energy waste, and lower emissions.
For example, unbalanced or stranded resources in data centers lead to unusable power, space, cooling and connectivity, creating high and unnecessary energy costs. This undoubtedly makes it challenging to meet business demands and sustainability goals.
Panduit has years of experience helping businesses strengthen their physical infrastructure as part of digital transformation projects. Our SmartZone™ Solutions provide visibility of actual power, cooling, space, and connectivity resources being utilized, as well as what is still available for use. This includes the ability to identify ‘stranded capacity’, where full utilization of one or more resources is constrained by full consumption of one or more other resource in a rack or cabinet.
And the SynapSense® Wireless Monitoring and Cooling Control Solution lets you gain control over unpredictable environmental conditions and capacity challenges. The turnkey cooling optimization platform gives you complete visibility and control through real-time monitoring. The benefits of cooling optimizations include reducing cooling energy use by up to 50%.
We’ve previously talked a lot about the benefits of colocation, and in the pursuit of becoming more sustainable, this approach certainly rings true. Colocation service providers will take care of day-to-day IT management for you, carrying out essential maintenance tasks – including performance monitoring. In turn this helps your organization to fulfill your plans to reduce energy waste in data centers. And ultimately letting your physical infrastructure become a contributor to more sustainable operations.
What do you think will be the impact on this due to this pandemic and do you think it is going to improve this year or even next year?. I would like to know how to handle this as I run a business Pcchimp technologies in India providing it infrastructure service for financial service companies.
Great question, and one that Panduit is also considering in depth. There are indicators that we are learning quickly as this virus continues to evolve. Impacts are being felt in the workplace with new work from home initiatives and changes in how the traditional office looks. Your best bet as you run your business is to review your clients’ needs with them and create the strategies together on how to reduce risk (eg. COVID restrictions limit workers on-site and flow of materials to a job site). You may also consider how you can adapt your business to provide services that mitigate their risk (managing their supplies, managed IT services). Including your suppliers in the conversations helps make sure all ideas are on the table and hidden negative consequences are avoided.
We look forward to hearing back from you on what you created/developed and your successes as you move forward!