Design checklist for Microsoft Sustainability Manager

How have you configured Microsoft Sustainability Manager?

  • Configure the organization data, such as business units and reporting years, before you import activity data.
  • Configure reference data before importing activity data according to regulations, conversions, and level of granularity.
  • Consider all operational factors to successfully record, report, and reduce carbon emissions.
  • Configure data connections using service accounts wherever possible.
  • Specify units and conversions to avoid calculation errors. Observe conversion units based on activity and model units.
  • Pay special attention to factor mappings to optimize the number of required calculation models.
  • Segment your organization access by role or department and copy roles to each business unit.
  • While you use the Auto-map option for mapping the source systems data during the ingestion, please validate that unnecessary fields aren't mapped by mistake.
  • Use OCID attribute value in Sustainability data model tables wherever possible to improve data import performance and also for record uniqueness, auditing in Microsoft Sustainability Manager for all the activity and emissions data.
  • While using Custom dimensions in PowerFx expression editor, ensure the data type validations are taken care of by the users.
  • Configure the calculation profile jobs to process less than the threshold limit of 50,000 records at a time.
  • Make sure the security and network firewall rules and configurations are addressed to allow the data import from the source systems into Sustainability Manager.

How have you extended Microsoft Sustainability Manager?

  • As part of your test strategy, validate the extensions to ensure they don’t negatively impact the user experience, responsiveness, performance, and how the solution behaves across different devices and platforms.
  • Ensure the extensions honor security, privacy, and compliance requirements. Ensure extensions are scalable, tested for high volume, and capable of handling peaks.
  • Align extensions with application lifecycle management (ALM) automated processes so you can build and deploy them efficiently and rapidly.
  • Ensure code and customizations follow only the documented supported techniques. Don’t use deprecated features and techniques.
  • Consider Custom dimensions before extending the data model.

How have you set your reporting and analytics strategy for Microsoft Sustainability Manager?

  • Make sure to align the reporting years and the reporting periods with your organization's reporting requirements before importing the activity and emissions data.
  • Take advantage of default reporting and embedded intelligence capabilities in the app.
  • Map out your organizational data estate to develop a holistic view of different data sources, the type of data they hold, and the schema used.
  • Define your analytics strategy and the tools to support it. Ensure your approach meets current and future reporting requirements while considering the data volumes and different sources of data.
  • Understand the security implications when exporting data from the app to external analytical data stores. Plan for how to protect and secure your data. Provide data access only to those who truly need it.

How have you secured your applications?

  • Be sure to copy from existing Sustainability Manager application roles and modify privileges when creating custom roles.
  • Be sure to set up the business unit structure properly to segment access to data and the user interface based on user responsibilities or sub-organization internal boundaries.
  • Group related business/operation users and configure Microsoft Entra groups as teams in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
  • Use non-default roles with caution and ensure backend processes don't fail due to privilege issues. For more information about user role segmentation, go to Set up user roles and access management.
  • Configure Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect your Microsoft Sustainability Manager resources and track your security progress.
  • Consider configuring Microsoft Sentinel to bring together signals.
  • Configure auditing, logging, and monitoring for services in use of Microsoft Sustainability Manager wherever the business requires. You should evaluate the performance and storage cost implications of unnecessary logging.
  • Limit high privilege access by using a Microsoft Entra group with Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for admin access to the environments.

How have you considered privacy and compliance in your design?

  • Identify regulatory requirements in countries where operations exist.
  • Review compliance requirements and validate the alignment with the compliance offerings planned for Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
  • Review data privacy. For license terms for Microsoft Sustainability Manager, Azure, and Microsoft Power Platform, go to Online Service Terms and Microsoft Privacy Statement. To learn about the Microsoft Sustainability Manager and applicable regulatory compliance, data protection, and privacy terms and conditions, go to Legal Information.

Next steps