Is your team ready for next January’s data center ESG reporting requirements? 

Matthew Farnell
Global Sales and Marketing Director, EkkoSense
Matthew Farnell

Over the next six months – initially in Europe, but increasingly around the world, we’re going to see a growing requirement for data center operators to report in granular detail on their ESG, sustainability and carbon consumption. That’s going to place an increased pressure on already under-resourced data center teams to gather the data and report on their energy performance. 
 
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is the EU’s framework for mandatory data center energy efficiency reporting for large businesses and listed SMEs. The start date for the first tranche of data collection is January 1st, 2024. Additionally, under the European Commission’s revised Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), data centres in scope that have over 500kW of installed IT power will be required to report publicly on their energy performance. 
 
With mandatory ESG disclosures and ‘double-materiality’ reporting that needs to consider both ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ from a sustainability perspective, the reporting challenge will be considerable – requiring evidence-based reporting and the ability to prove any ESG disclosures that have been made. At a minimum, this will require the tracking incoming and outgoing data traffic, temperature set points, power, water, and carbon usage effectiveness, as well as the criteria set out under the ISO/IEC 30134 standard. 
 
Without access to granular level sustainability reporting data, it’s going to be very difficult to answer specific questions about rack density, power usage, PUE measurements, and other ISO/IEC 30134 standard requirements. Most legacy DCIM and BMS tools simply don’t provide this kind of reporting as standard, while bringing this level of ESG insight together from multiple spreadsheet reports will impose a significant report burden. 
 
That’s where EkkoSense can help. Our highly visual EkkoSoft Critical AI-powered SaaS solution not only lets you optimize your data center performance – it also provides an effective real-time ESG reporting capability that offers exactly the kind of data that the revised EED and CSRD require. Instead of having to wait months to develop and implement an expensive custom reporting system, EkkoSense’s ESG reporting can be deployed within just weeks – so organizations – whether you’re a small, single-site data center operator or a large multi-site estate – can be live and gathering ESG data in time for January’s CSRD and EED deadlines. 
 
If you would like to find out more about sustainability and data centre ESG reporting and why it’s set to become a core compliance challenge for operations teams, then you can download my new free eBook – Corporate Sustainability Reporting for data centres – are you ready? I’ll also be at DCD Connect London on the 2nd-3rd October, where I’ll be discussing Innovations in ESG data reporting in a dedicated Tech Showcase session – details here. Not attending? Contact me to see how I can help you with your data centre challenges.