Do companies have the means to think digitally in a reasonable way?

• Because no one wants digital technology to one day become the number one source of pollution in the world,

  20 Minutes

  is focusing this summer on the digital sobriety of companies.

  Where we are ?

• In this first episode, we inspect the

  cloud

  , digital services and

  slow tech

  to understand what alternatives companies have to minimize their ecological footprint.

• The place of

  cloud operators,

  heavyweights in terms of environmental impact, is essential today and subject to many debates.

What is less heavy and less real than a cloud?

According to Tristan Labaume, founding president of the Green IT alliance, “today is the madness of the

where everyone puts everything and anything in it”.

But “the

is not in the clouds, but in the

”, assures the expert.

And companies again and again come up against the same problem in terms of environmental impact: "manufacturing new equipment to maintain servers and

systems in

has an impact 80 times greater than the first year of use," he adds.

If, as Frédéric Bordage, independent expert and founder of Green IT, assures us, "

operators have done a remarkable job for fifteen years to reduce electricity consumption", should we then take advantage of this to store ever more data? ?

It's a no for Caroline Vateau, “responsible digital” director at Capgemini Invent.

“It's important to manage your consumption, to make sure that you manage infobesity, unnecessary storage.

It's not Versailles, what!

On the model of managing its energy consumption, we must do the same in the

by setting limits.

»

Companies therefore face multiple challenges in implementing a policy of digital sobriety, i.e. “reasonable because reasoned use of digital technology”, according to Frédéric Bordage.

Slow

, the eco-design of digital services, the search for a responsible

, so many concepts that are integrated step by step into the governance of companies.

The construction of infrastructures, the sinews of war

"You haven't missed your life at 40 if you don't have a connected watch! insists Frédéric Bordage.

We must agree to go back down to second class, promote re-employment and think about digital sobriety ”.

While it is often associated with constraint, sobriety is nevertheless creative and allows positive solutions to emerge.

Caroline Vateau, who recently worked on the Nega Octet public project, a repository for measuring the environmental impact of digital services and proposing ways to improve, makes a clear observation: "there is a real reflection to be had on the work and on equipment, on how to make them last as long as possible, on how to delay software obsolescence".

The expert therefore ensures that companies must make choices, carefully select what is essential in digital services and make them work “as economically as possible”.

In a word, think about the eco-design of their digital services.

“And create them in a very sober way,” adds Frédéric Bordage.

Slow

tech

at the service of digital sobriety

As for the start-up WeatherForce, based in Toulouse, which offers a rainfall forecasting service for farmers,

has profoundly transformed the way of working.

Frédéric Bordage, who intervened in the context of a collective operation set up by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Hérault and Ademe, called "Green Concept", tells how a smartphone equipped with 4G, the equipment needed to access it, we switched to a 2G phone receiving SMS.

"In order for this service to exist in emerging countries not equipped with 4G and also to ecodesign it, we worked on a pilot village in Côte d'Ivoire," explains the expert.

Smartphones and state-of-the-art networks have been replaced by a system with two solutions: on the one hand, sending a text message to a mobile that may be 20 years old, and on the other, to circumvent the 30% illiteracy in the country, the teacher receives the SMS and writes the information on the board, which is then transmitted to the parents who work the land when the children come home from school”.

Frédéric Bordage is delighted: "We do not modify the impacts already created, we avoid them".

And for good reason, thanks to this

solution , all dispensable digital has been removed.

"It's the perfect example of a

use where

is used only in Toulouse for the forecasting supercomputer, which allows you to know precisely and reliably when the rain is going to fall, and thus to sow and harvest at the right time, by limiting the use of inputs, namely fertilizers, pesticides…”.

Cloud

operators

soon to be consultants in digital sobriety?

Making an inventory of needs, reasoning about the stored data, "it also means learning to resize and update the applications that are migrated to the cloud", insists Caroline Vateau.

The ease of access to the

is a bias for companies – as for individuals for that matter – who have the impression that they do not need to choose.

"By pressing a button, everyone can have access to computing resources, without interruption of service, copied to several places, abounds the expert.

However, if

have made great progress in terms of energy efficiency, operators still have work to do regarding the limitation of stocks and especially the circularity of the components they use”.

On the model of energy suppliers, Caroline Vateau even suggests that cloud providers eventually advise their customers in the choice of their storage offer.

“Why not take advantage of their experience and their visibility to support companies in reducing their environmental footprint, and theirs at the same time?

“If the practice is marginal today, the reason is obviously financial: “the more a company consumes, the more it is interesting for the

she admits, confused

For Frédéric Bordage, the effort must go even further.

“How is it possible that

do not show transparency on their environmental impacts?, he protests.

They only deal with greenhouse gas emissions, which in France only constitute 11% of the impact of digital technology.

Which means they evade almost 90% of their impact.

Either they're dumb or they're pretending.

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