Why Sustainable Software Engineering is beneficial to Both the Environment and A Business’s Bottom Line

When the issue of climate change and the need to take actionable steps to save our planet is brought up, it’s normal to think about fossil fuels and other activities that contribute significantly to climate change. Apart from some areas of software development, like applications for the blockchain, not much is said about the energy consumption of software. It receives very little attention.

Applications and software infrastructures require energy to run. Therefore, they impact environmental sustainability by extension. The knowledge of this fact has made a growing number of developers turn to what’s widely termed sustainable software engineering.

What is Sustainable Software Engineering?

Sustainable software engineering, also known as sustainable software development, is a shift in software development approach that advocates the need for energy efficiency and environmental sustainability during software design, implementation, testing, and deployment.

The primary goal of this new approach is to reduce the effect of applications and software infrastructures on the environment.

The Core Principles of Sustainable Software Engineering

Each application development is unique and every team may have to approach the pursuit of environmental sustainability in different ways. However, there are some general areas developers are required to focus on:

1. Application Optimization

This emphasizes the need to find more energy-efficient ways to run applications. Developers should improve efficiency as much as possible and desist from including features that are not necessary. The energy wasted on inefficient applications can become significant over time.

2. Deployment Optimization

Sustainable software engineers prefer less energy-consuming deployment options over others. For instance, deploying software in containers is considered more energy efficient than deploying in VMs. Sustainable development requires developers to opt for the former.

3. Data Center Choices

Choosing a data center that is committed to improving environmental stability means that your application could be more ‘green.’ Working with a provider with a significant level of commitment to environmental sustainability is a core value of sustainable software engineering.

4. Infrastructure Architectures

Having your software or digital assets hosted on multiple cloud destinations is always helpful, but it also increases the overall amount of energy needed to keep your application going. Engineers consider this when weighing the impact of their hosting decisions.

5. Application Architecture

Developers can achieve lower levels of energy consumption by adopting application architectures that are more energy efficient.

Why is Sustainable Software Engineering Important?

A sustainable development approach can help you save money in the long run. Choosing less energy-consuming options for your application means that your hosting costs will be less. However, you may have to bear some upfront costs that come with shifting to sustainable application development methodologies.

In a nutshell, the initial spending on things, like investing in resources to refactor applications and restructuring inefficient applications, will be canceled out by the time you start enjoying lower overall hosting bills. What about the positive impact on the environment? That’s worth more than money!

The Role of Sustainable Software Engineering in Advanced Digital Innovation R&D Lab

Any company that wants to thrive in an ever-changing and competitive business world must be committed to creating innovations. Organizations leverage advanced digital innovation labs to stay ahead of the competition with innovative products and solutions. The question is, how does sustainable application development impact digital innovation?

When it comes to promoting sustainable development, the innovation creation processes should be expanded to include a set of ‘green’ practices. Instead of focusing only on the research and development of cutting-edge solutions, developers are expected to pursue sustainability, as well.

An eco-friendly digital innovation R&D lab is beneficial because it enables you to build new solutions and adopt state-of-the-art technologies at reduced costs. Sustainable development reduces the cost of hosting applications in the long run.

Consequently, a company that opts to build new products using ‘green’ practices stands to enjoy lower costs in the long term. That said, let’s take a look at the role of digital innovation labs in building a thriving business and why it’s important in 2022.

Why is Advanced Digital Innovation Lab So Important in 2022?

The present digital landscape is unstable with a range of problems plaguing businesses globally. From the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and sophisticated cyber attacks to the spike in prices of raw materials and rising inflation in many nations of the world, organizations are facing severe business challenges.

Staying ahead of the curve in the face of these problems requires advanced innovation. This is where the digital innovation lab comes in! Here’s why you need digital innovation in 2022:

1. Innovative Products & Solutions

Leveraging an advanced digital innovation R&D lab, you can build solutions that stand out in the industry. If you’re looking to become a leader in your space, you need research and development to create something outstanding. As long as you keep doing things the old way, you’re not likely to get the recognition you want.

2. Competitive Advantage

Even though the competition is fierce across industries, you can predictably stay on top of the game with innovation. Lack of innovation is one of the reasons companies fold or go out of business. Timely innovation will make consumers tilt towards your offers and offer you the competitive advantage you need to remain a relevant force in your industry.

3. Security

Staying a thousand miles ahead of malicious cyber actors requires the implementation of immutable security infrastructure. Whether you outsource security or not, you still need some level of technical compliance in your custom products and business operations tools. And creating your products with security as an integral part of the development process makes it easy to comply with best practices.

Conclusion

Adopting sustainable software engineering is the way to go if you want to save the environment — without significantly increasing your costs of operation. There will be an upfront cost implication. However, you stand to save a lot of money off sustainable practices in the long term. Looking to create innovation through sustainable engineering? We can help you!

We’re Bredec Digital Innovation Lab. We provide our customers with a wide range of specialized products and solutions we’re experts in next-generation, multi-environment development, hyperscaling, edge computing, and hyper-secure applications. Let’s build innovations together!

Let’s get in touch!

Inquiry@bredec.com

Contributors; Gray Oshin (content creator), Melanie Matt (concept and strategy) & Alessandro Benoni (Head of Digital Innovation lab)