Alma’s sustainable approach to technology

Alma Media’s technology strategy is linked to the company’s sustainable development goals, focusing on optimizing resources and minimizing environmental impacts. The company’s Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) promotes the sustainable use of cloud services, which has led to significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Utilizing cloud services also enhances energy efficiency, as capacity is used only when needed, reducing both costs and environmental impact.

Technology strategy and sustainability

Alma Media’s technology strategy is intertwined with its sustainability goals. The company’s focus on sustainable and secure development includes proactive maintenance, favoring managed services, and maintaining high-quality codebases.

– We’ve designed our approach ensuring that as we grow and innovate, we’re also minimizing our environmental impact, describes Antti Koivisto, Chief Technology Officer of Alma Media.

Company constantly optimizes its’ systems, reducing unnecessary resource usage, and extending the lifespan of its’ digital services. This translates to lower energy consumption and less e-waste.

– Perhaps most importantly, our cloud strategy leverages the advanced sustainability features of major cloud providers. By implementing infrastructure as code and following modern cloud practices, we’re able to optimize our resource usage continuously, reducing both costs and our carbon footprint, Koivisto continues.

In the video, Antti Koivisto talks about Alma Media’s technology strategy from sustainability perspective.

Cloud Center of Excellence in pivotal role

Alma Media’s recently established Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) plays a pivotal role in the company’s sustainability efforts. CCoE focuses on optimizing cloud resource usage, promoting cloud-native architectures, and implementing infrastructure as code. These practices not only reduce costs but also minimize the company’s carbon footprint. The CCoE also educates teams across the organization about sustainable cloud practices, fostering a culture of environmental sustainability.

– We’ve had a strategy of moving to the public cloud already since 2012 and we’ve had cloud experts in multiple teams working on this issue ever since says Koivisto.

Alma’s primary public cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services, have been instrumental in reducing the company’s carbon emissions. Migration to AWS has resulted in notable reductions in CO2 equivalent emissions, based on Amazon’s estimates, even 90 % or more.

Cloud computing and energy efficiency

One of the key pillars of Alma Media’s technology strategy is the extensive use of cloud computing.

– AWS allows us to only use capacity when it is needed. For example, Etuovi.com has a lot of servers running during the day. During night this capacity is not needed, and thanks to AWS we both save costs and produce less emissions as we can scale down the capacity automatically, tells Koivisto.

By migrating workloads to public cloud services, Alma Media leverages the energy efficiency of large-scale data centers. These cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, offer optimized infrastructure that significantly reduces energy consumption compared to traditional on-premises data centers. Alma Media’s ongoing initiatives to migrate remaining workloads to the cloud are expected to further decrease the company’s carbon footprint.

– With all this experience, we naturally recognize there’s still room for improvement. We’re in the early stages of exploring how to more explicitly incorporate sustainability into our product development lifecycle and we see this as an exciting opportunity for innovation, concludes Koivisto.

Read more about Alma’s sustainability.

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