Design principles for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
As sustainability continues to become a top priority for organizations, there's a growing need to integrate sustainable practices into all aspects of business operations, including technology infrastructure. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solves this challenge by enabling organizations to manage and track their sustainability performance across operations, products, and supply chains.
To ensure that the solution meets the highest standards of sustainability, Microsoft has developed a set of design principles for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. These design principles build on the five pillars of architectural excellence in Azure Well-Architected Framework and provide guidance for building sustainable and scalable solutions. In these articles, we explore the following design principles and how you can apply them to create effective and efficient sustainability solutions.
| Design principle | Description |
|---|---|
| Build for the needs of business | A business requirement must justify every design decision. |
| Unify data intelligence | Gain the visibility you require to effectively drive sustainability reporting, sustainability efforts, and business transformation. |
| Assign least privilege | Implement least privilege throughout the application and control plane to protect against data exfiltration and malicious actor scenarios. |
| Streamline data and calculation | Create emission factors and factor mappings to dynamically calculate emissions from the ingested activity and reference data or prepare precalculated emissions data for ingestion. |
| Set your extract, transform, and load (ETL) strategy to prepare data for ingestion | Assess the variety, volume, and velocity of the source data and set up the ETL strategy to prepare data for ingestion. |
| Use native connectors instead of building custom connectors | Use one of the native Power Query connectors for data ingestion along with the transformation capability of Power Query instead of building a custom connector. |
| Set your emissions calculation strategy | Assess the default dynamic calculation models, built-in factor libraries, and factor mappings in Microsoft Sustainability Manager. Based on the evaluation and complexity of business requirements, configure new calculation models and factor libraries using agreed-upon industry guidelines. |
| Design for operations | Standardize and centralize the logging and auditing of each solution component. Use Application Insights and Log Analytics to collect on-premises, hybrid cloud, PaaS, and Power Platform logs. |
| Monitor the health of the entire solution | Know about the scalability and resiliency of the infrastructure, application, and dependent services. Gather and review key performance counters regularly. |
| Report, disclose and automate insights | Streamline the delivery of more accurate, reliable, and auditable sustainability reports to the public and regulatory agencies. |
| Bring in only the necessary activity data for calculations | Ingest only the source activity data that you require for calculation. Handle extra data for analytics or preprocessing outside of the solution. |