Orange Business commitment to sustainable cloud practices

• A sustainable cloud strategy is a central pillar of Orange Business’ overarching mission to create a more responsible digital world.
• Orange Business is working on sustainable cloud computing through several initiatives, including energy-efficient data centers, eco-design principles, industry partnerships and emissions tracking.
• By integrating sustainable cloud solutions, Orange Business reinforces its commitment to eco-conscious digital transformation.

According to the World Economic Forum¹, carbon emissions and global temperatures continue to rise, indicating that technological progress may be happening at an unsustainable rate. Last year, for example, unprecedented land and sea temperatures were observed.²

The server farms generate significant heat that requires large, power-intensive cooling systems and massive volumes of water to prevent overheating. Data centers already consume 1-1.5% of global electricity, and AI-optimized data centers, which use even more energy, are expected to more than quadruple this by 2030, predicts the International Energy Agency.³

NTT Data, the world’s third-largest data center provider, is already warning that the AI resource demand is unsustainable. It is urging organizations to embed environmental responsibility into every stage of AI development and deployment. In a recent report, NTT Data highlights the fact that data centers are already consuming approximately 1.5% of global electricity and are increasing at a rate of 15% a year, far exceeding other sectors.⁴

As climate concerns intensify, businesses face a stark choice: continue their current path and deal with adverse environmental fallout or transition to more eco-friendly cloud technologies. 

Orange Business is committed to Eco Design as a central part of our strategy to reduce environmental impact, and we help customers do the same. 

To contribute to a sustainable cloud ecosystem, developers and businesses must build and operate applications that limit the amount of hardware resources needed to deliver them and, in the long term, reduce the frequency with which hardware needs to be renewed. At the same time, they need to cut the energy requirements for data centers and networks. 

While enterprises do not have a direct choice in their cloud provider’s energy usage, they can make strategic decisions regarding more sustainable options. With serverless computing, the provider supplies and manages the engine that runs small pieces of code. The customer only pays for the actual execution of the code time, for example. Containers, which we offer, are components packaged together that run on a container engine. Containers have faster stop/start times, for example, which avoids wasted idle resources. They are lightweight, so fewer servers are required, which lowers cooling and power demands in data centers. 

Adopting intelligent load balancing to maximize resources, and leveraging cloud providers’ renewable energy options, replacing monolithic server architectures and manual load balancing can also contribute to reducing environmental impact. For example, developers can use green coding practices to optimize software energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. Additionally, observability tools can be utilized to evaluate the environmental impact of cloud operations. 

We also understand that we cannot reach our goal of net zero alone, so we are working with a partner ecosystem to innovate more quickly. We partner with major technology companies through decarbonization agreements, engage with corporate customers through a Customer Sustainability Council, and embed sustainability into all our functional entities by assigning them financial and carbon budgets.

We have also collaborated with Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) to provide the hardware infrastructure for our Cloud Avenue offer via HPE GreenLake. This contract promotes efficient resource utilization by deploying only the servers necessary to meet customer demand and recycling or refurbishing them at the end of their life.

We have worked with the French Environment and Management Agency (ADEME) on its guidelines to define a methodology for evaluating the environmental impacts of data centers and cloud services. The methodology was tested in real-world scenarios to validate its consistency and ease of use.

We have also developed a carbon estimator to estimate the carbon footprint of Orange Business offerings. It can convert monetary figures into CO2 impact. Customers can use this data to establish a baseline carbon footprint, especially for Scope 3 emissions, where direct data collection can be challenging. 

The carbon estimator displays Emissions factors in the weight of CO2 emissions per euro of spend (tCO2e/€), from the most carbon-intensive category to the least. Categories include cloud, digital services, IoT services, contact center and collaboration, and telephony. This enables our customers to understand better the carbon emissions associated with their purchases, which correspond to their upstream Scope 3 emissions.

The environmental impact of cloud is undoubtedly under greater scrutiny as energy-efficient computing became a top 10 technology trend in 2025, according to Gartner.⁹ Here at Orange Business, we are working towards a vision of cloud computing that drives digital transformation and business outcomes, mitigates environmental impact, and is built on responsibility and trust. 

By integrating sustainability into every phase of our cloud services—from design to operations—we are looking to be the partner of choice for enterprises seeking to reduce their carbon footprint while accelerating innovation.