SaaS-tainability: the green answer to digital transformation

Considering the crippling effects of natural disasters on the world’s population – be it wildfires in Australia and Canada or flooding in Japan – or the ongoing challenges of the current pandemic, no other sector beside hi-tech seems to be coming out ahead.

Technology companies are at the forefront of adopting innovation and emerging cultural trends. The environment is no exception. Recent years have seen tech leaders increasing corporate awareness about sustainability and taking action accordingly. They’ve also found that in the process, it increases profitability.

This was confirmed by management consultant firm AT Kearney, who found that during the Great Recession, sustainable businesses outperformed their less-sustainable counterparts over a six-month period by 15%.

Still, when it comes to making this shift, many tech companies struggle.

For example, many still rely on resource-consuming proprietary in-house servers, hardware and software, which in turn, create strong dependencies on dedicated IT management. Yet with such high switching costs, moving to more sustainable models makes any transition difficult. In the meantime, these companies continue generating mounds of environmental waste from their high IT footprint, such as carbon emissions generated by dedicated data centers.

SaaS to the rescue

While adopting cloud technology represents a major step forward towards reducing one’s environmental footprint, it requires significant ongoing investment in managing and maintaining the actual applications.

Software-as-a-Service – or SaaS – fills this gap. It’s a shared, multi-tenant cloud application that exposes an interface for its users to perform specific tasks. The range of SaaS software applications covers a huge spectrum, ranging from rich communications, billing and design tools to customer relationship management human resources, ecommerce and more.

But the beauty of SaaS lies in the architecture – disconnecting end-users from IT resources (i.e., compute, storage, networking), with the SaaS provider assuming behind-the-scenes responsibility for maintaining the apps, rolling out updates, adding features and resolving issues on a global scale, rather than having to do it for each individual installation – and without compromising on security, speed, and privacy.

No less important are the sustainability benefits. As a shared application platform, the SaaS architecture typically provides improved IT efficiency over other architectures, by:

• Reducing redundant gas emissions
• Decreasing duplication of infrastructure and hardware
• Eliminating redundant compute usage
• Optimizing manpower and enabling employees to work remotely

Digital brands use case

Digital brand companies are innovative and lean service providers who target digital savvy end-users. Many begin with a small customer base, and with high growth rates can increase their user base into the millions at a rapid pace. SaaS is a great option for these companies, who without starting out with large IT budgets, can utilize the technology to the maximum to quickly scale up or down according to business need.

Optimize to SaaS!

With the development of SaaS technology, transitioning to a resource-efficient, environmentally-friendly SaaS model has become much easier. And in addition to these benefits, it allows organizations to play their part in reducing emissions and promoting a sustainable environment, with all the associated benefits this brings.

Amdocs offers a SaaS solution specifically tailored to the needs of digital brands, efficiently helping them scale from launch to maturity without the need for heavy IT investment, resulting in a more efficient environmental footprint, as well as improved agility and cost efficiency.