Sustainability in A Digital World

Show notes

Welcome to Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast, hosted by Joe Nash. Our podcast is your go-to source for tips and insights to scale your business’s online presence and e-commerce vertical. We cover all tech trends that impact company culture, design, accessibility, and scalability challenges – without all the complicated technical jargon.

Our guest today is Ran Sanghera, Head of Sustainability at IONOS, a digital partner for cloud solutions and web hosting. We discuss the multifaceted nature of sustainability, the importance of prioritizing sustainability initiatives, and the role of stakeholders in driving change. We also delve into the challenges of achieving carbon neutrality, the economic footprint of data centers, and the potential of green ledgers and blockchain.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

  • A granular look at Sustainability
  • Achieving sustainability as a multi-stakeholder approach
  • Some misconceptions about sustainability
  • Sustainability challenges for a cloud provider
  • The role of biodiversity in sustainability
  • Sustainability over a five to ten-year horizon

Plug your headphones in and join us! 🎧

Show transcript

Ran Sanghera Transcript

Joe - 00: 00:01: Welcome to Beyond the Screen and IONOS podcast, where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence, hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and It industry, and exploring how the IONOS brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. We're your hosts, Joe Nash and Liz Moy. Hi and welcome to the Beyond the Screen podcast. My name is Joe Nash and your host for Today, and I am joined by Ran Sanghera who has 15 years of experience in the sustainability field and is now Head of Sustainability of IONOS. Ran, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

Ran - 00: 00:35: Yeah, nice to meet you, Joe. Thanks for the introduction. I appreciate that.

Joe - 00: 00:38: Yeah, absolutely. And we're very excited to have you on the show today and to chat about all things sustainability. And I guess to kick us off, we should deal with the nomenclature and get that out the way. Can you run us through what is sustainability?

Ran - 00: 00:50: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think probably one that I have to deal with on a kind of day-to-day basis. I think how I actually normally approach that question is I try to break down the preconceptions that people might have of what they think is sustainability. So commonly, I think it naturally leans into environmental topics, specifically climate change. And the second one is also to do with charitable efforts or supporting your local community. And those are obviously really core parts of sustainability. But I think what people maybe don't realize is that sustainability is such a broad topic, encompasses so many different aspects. And I think maybe to give you a little bit more detail on those, the planet climate change is intrinsic part of sustainability. But I think even within that planet or environmental pillar, people sometimes forget about biodiversity, water use, pollution, all those other aspects of the environment, but they also link to climate change for sure. I think another aspect of sustainability that is maybe a little bit under the radar is the people topic as well. So diversity and inclusion is obviously a big part of that, how you engage with your local communities that I mentioned. But what I think also surprises people is when I tell them that sustainability is also about how a company focuses on their company culture, what they're doing to ensure that they have strategies in place to attract talent to retain them, that they're working on employee engagement. And then also like health and safety and other aspects like that. Then where it gets really kind of gray, where people get really surprised about this is sustainability is that there's a whole range of governance, compliance, regulatory topics, data privacy, information, security is also to do with sustainability. How you look at sustainability within your supply chains, reaching out to your suppliers. Long story short, what I'm trying to say is it's really complex, but my favorite definition of sustainability is that I see sustainability as essentially a business strategy that allows a company to create long term value with a specific focus on planet people and profit. And that's where I never forget about. For me, sustainability makes good business sense and every sustainability measure or initiative should be adding value to the company.

Joe - 00: 03:18: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think the encapsulation of that planet people and profit I think does a lot to capture the myriad areas that you spoke about. So you said a whole bunch there. So we're going to jump around a little bit as we go back and forth on that, I guess to cover that really broad base of things sustainability means. I also imagine that means there's lots of ways that people come into this field. So what was your journey? How did you end up with this interest and finding yourself as Head of Sustainability at IONOS?

Ran - 00: 03:43: Oh wow, there's 15 years there. I tried to keep it like a short and snappy rather than give you my life story, but I think when I started off in sustainability I wasn't really sure. Well, back then it was a very new emerging niche field, not like how it is today. I didn't have a broad choice of jobs to jump into. So I started off in the NGO charity sector with an organization called Friends of the Earth. I was focusing on sustainable food initiatives, making local communities aware that benefits of local food reducing their environmental impact. But I think there I quickly realized that I wanted to work on the corporate side of sustainability. Then I became an environmental business consultant with small to medium sized businesses, local shop owners, SMBs, small manufacturers and then I went completely in the opposite direction and then I became a consultant for investors. That's also where people aren't aware that one of the main reasons why sustainability is really becoming so important now is that there's investors pushing the agenda and they want companies to become more sustainable. I did that for about ten years and then I realized also I had a great time being a consultant that essentially that I wanted to work with larger companies on sustainability, be actually on the ground floor, driving the measures, educating the people that have the power and resources to make a difference. And then I ended up I earn off.

Joe - 00: 05:11: Awesome. Yeah, it's a really great point about what we said about investors. It's interesting. I'm starting to get the sense that the fact that that is one of the areas where change has been driven is starting to penetrate the mainstream because you see more and more kind of news items breaking about so and so, big hedgefund no longer will take these stocks, etcetera. It does seem there is a sea change there. Yeah. Thank you for running us through that gauntlet of 15 years of history. Really appreciate it. So to go back to your introduction to sustainability. You mentioned lots of figures who I guess we could call stakeholders in the future of the planet. Maybe that's a bit of a corporate term for it. But in terms of driving this change for you and for owners as a company, which of those stakeholders, from the people to the customers to the policymakers is most driving that change for you?

Ran - 00: 05:55: When I mentioned all those different elements of sustainability, I think every stakeholder has a different interest or driver or topics of sustainability that they're interested in. And then I don't want to downplay that one interest is more important than the other. I think I'm probably biased to a point where I've worked for the majority of my career with investors. I know that they have money and the power to force companies to drive change. So by and large, I think for me and because of my background, they will always be the most important stakeholder. Companies might not always see the value behind sustainability or particularly understand what it's about, particularly with that a lot of companies might focus more on the short term, medium term profitability rather than seeing addition to long term value. So for me, investors are great at driving change. They're involved in that regulatory sphere where they're working with the EU committees and policymakers to create legislation that drives companies forward on the agenda. So I think, yeah, a lot of sustainability managers are unfortunately quite cynical. People, I think, would like to think that people have good intentions at heart but sometimes people just need to be pushed forward.

Joe - 00: 07:10: Yeah, absolutely. And I think within driving any change there's always a certain amount of working within the existing incentive structure. Right? And it seems like investors are key to that incentive structure for the way that the environment, the business is currently operating. So that makes total sense to me.

Ran - 00: 07:25: Yeah, I think there's also other stakeholders within that sphere and they're also important. So for me, employees, for one example, right, sustainability and diversity and those talent attraction retention initiatives is a way to keep your employees engaged at the company, keep them happy, which makes them productive. That's also equally important. Another reason why sustainability is becoming more and more apparent in the media is because there's larger companies who are reaching out to their suppliers and driving that change. But it's also coming from the other side of customers where companies have larger customers, they're reaching out and they want to work with sustainable companies and suppliers.

Joe - 00: 08:05: So there's like folks who are making sure the whole supply chain is sustainable. So come down from your customers. You want to make sure they're using sustainable services from your end. And then equally for I know you want to be making sure that things downstream is sustainable. That makes sense and I guess it's a beneficial knock on effect for everyone. So I guess before we move on to, I guess here on this specific sustainability context while we're just at this higher level, what are some common misconceptions people have about sustainability? What are some challenges you face in communicating these concepts?

Ran - 00: 08:31: There's a lot of different preconceptions I have, but I guess now focusing on the digital sustainability aspect in particular, from the conversations that I've had with not our customers specifically, but developers, people with a lot more technical knowledge than I will ever have, there's either one, two polar extremes. So there's one that the impact of digital sustainability isn't so significant. And so I think people don't like you said with the title of the podcast, people don't think beyond the screen. They essentially think, there's the battery to power my phone, there's the battery to power my laptop. Maybe my laptop was manufactured somewhere in a factory, but that's essentially it. And then there's the other flip side, which is a lot of clickbait articles of the internet is killing the planet. The internet has double the amount of carbon emissions than the airline industry. And in reality, I'm not trying to say, like, digital sustainability is perfect and there's no impact, but it's kind of like a middle ground. But it's understandable that people have these preconceptions. I guess the other aspect as well is that people always think sustainability is purely about being green and environmental sustainability bringing them back to that sustainability isn't this add-on. It's not this additional cost makes like a nice bit of marketing for the company when I see it. It's really like, measures will create long term value for your company. And I could list off so many different examples of that. And it's part of my job to make people see the value of sustainability rather than being this nice to have additional adult extra.

Joe - 00: 10:05: Yeah, the point about, I guess, the challenges digital sustainability in general. And for a consumer to grapple with digital sustainability, they already need to have a certain level of literacy about how the cloud even works and what's happening on their client devices and those kind of things, which is a lot to ask for the vast majority of consumers. I hadn't thought about that angle on it before. That must be quite the challenge. So I think that leads us nicely into talking about why sustainability matters for a cloud provider at all. I mean, obviously, I guess first up, we have just the size of the operations, right? You're operating a lot of data centers, and these are electricity consuming situations. Like, what are the fundamental challenges for a cloud provider in the sustainability field?

Ran - 00: 10:45: So I guess the challenges, I think how we address those challenges and those material impacts and IONOS focuses on environmental sustainability. Like, so to start, so beyond the screen, we have data centers, the infrastructure that essentially that we use to provide services and products to our customers. So significant amount of energy consumption, significant amount of it, and server waste that is created. So in terms of environmental sustainability, climate change, energy and secular economy, which in short has to do with recycling, reuse and refurbishment. Those are the key material impacts that we have in terms of environmental sustainability. So how we go about addressing those when I talk about what IONOS does, I always like to back that up with facts and figures because that's what I'm always looking for from other companies, right? So not just this is what sustainability means, like what's the actual initiatives, the facts and figures to back that up. So I'm really actually proud to say that since 2018, despite actually continuing to grow as a company, during that time we've actually been able to reduce our absolute energy consumption by about 9%. So the reason why we've been able to reduce our absolute energy consumption is technology develops rapidly and that's obviously helping us to reduce our energy consumption. But we have a dedicated energy management team in place and we had done for like several years. We've got an energy management system in place, it's externally certified and within that for each of our eleven known data centers we have energy efficiency targets for each individual data center every year. And that means we will do an evaluation, we identify how we can improve energy efficiency, we do retrofits, refurbishments, upgrades, we invest in new technologies and equipment and yeah, helped us on that journey on the circular economy part. That's where in different countries are we working. We have a lot of different green IT partners. So using the German and French data centers as an example, we work with an organization called AFB, okay? And AFB is once IT equipment or servers get to the end of life, this organization will come, they come and collect the equipment and then they will actively work to take it apart, determine what can be recycled, what can be refurbished, what can be resold. What I particularly like about AFB is whilst they're helping us with the environmental impact, recycling, reuse, refurbishment, they're also a majority of employer of people with disabilities, more than 50%. So they're not only helping us to create an environmental impact, they're also helping us create like a social impact as well.

Joe - 00: 13:27: The data centers being quite large installations, I imagine they have a sizable economic footprint in terms of providing jobs to local areas and being able to utilize companies like that further increases the economic opportunities that your center is able to offer to an area they situate in, I guess, anyway.

Ran - 00: 13:42: So we've also had like 100% renewable electricity for many years. We have backup generators for the data centers and we use diesel and it's unavoidable. Any organization that has a data center, the vast majority of them have to use diesel for their backup generators. That's a very small part of our carbon emissions. And we use trusted offsets but we only use trusted carbon offsets as absolute last step. It's not the first step. And combined with the 100% renewable electricity for all of our own data centers and offsetting the minimal amount of diesel emissions. I don't like using the term climate neutral, but it helps us to avoid and reduce a significant amount of our carbon emissions to the point where you could say we're climate neutral for our direct operations.

Joe - 00: 14:29: Okay, so I want to dig into a couple of things there just for folks who haven't encountered a lot of the challenges of working with offsets or climate neutrality. So you mentioned that you don't want to use the word climate neutral and you mentioned trusted offsets. Like, why are both those disclaimers?

Ran - 00: 14:42: Yeah, this comes back to the kind of preconceptions question and my feeling is that customers can get bamboozled with the amount of terms that are out there to the point where even I won't lie, even I'm still bamboozled by them. I'm like climate neutral, carbon positive, carbon negative, net, zero, science based. So if I'm bamboozled, imagine like how our customers think. So for me, a company can make the broad claim and say, hey man, we're climate neutral, throw some pictures of the trees on their website, everything's great. But for me it's like, how do you achieve that climate neutral claim? Is it because you purchase some low quality, really cheap carbon offset somewhere and that allows you to make that claim and mislead your customers? So that's why I avoid using that term to be much clearer about, look, this is how we avoid carbon through renewable electricity, through reusing and refurbishing IT servers. And this is where we offset as a last step, particularly with trusted projects because it's growing kind of exponentially of all of these different carbon offset projects. Lots of different companies springing up in lots of different parts of the world. And I think if you Google it and look in the news, there's a lot of criticism that's being directed that maybe that these projects don't work, they haven't been properly evaluated, maybe they're even actually causing environmental damage. So I think that's where there's a big responsibility on companies to not say we just want to offset, so where's the cheapest quickest provider that we can find? It's more about a quality provider that's gone through some kind of evaluation so IONOS, specifically, we don't publicize the offsets or the projects that we support because we want to put more focus on the carbon reduction and avoidance energy efficiency initiatives. But, yeah, we've evaluated a list of suppliers and the projects, and we're like, okay, we want to support these ones because they seem to be doing the.

Joe - 00: 16:45: Thing they say they are doing, which exactly.

Ran - 00: 16:46: Yeah. We had a new data center come online in Worcester, UK in October of last year. And I think for us, going forward, it's really setting the blueprint of how we will move forward with environmental sustainability. Firstly, it's going to be one of our most energy efficient base centers. I mentioned that the carbon emissions from diesel backup generators, we're actually going to have biofuel powered generators which will help us to reduce the carbon emissions from diesel by 90%. The steel that was used in its construction was carbon offset with trusted supplies. And for the very first time, we also actually integrated biodiversity aspects into it. And that was a key consideration. So B and Bug hotels to support the local biodiversity in addition to all of the other 100% renewable electricity?

Joe - 00: 17:33: Yeah, I mean, as a big topic, we can jump around and I'm going to make you do it right now. So we spoke that lots of people think just climate and they think CO2 and they think global warming. Biodiversity is obviously a hugely important part of sustainability and is in fact why a lot of that is important. Can you briefly explain to folks like what you mean when you say biodiversity and why you're interested in preserving it? Yeah.

Ran - 00: 17:53: So in terms of our business sector, biodiversity isn't the biggest environmental priority. It's like climate change, energy, secular, economy. But we have sites and we can support the local biodiversity within those regions. So what I mean by biodiversity is flora and fauna, insects, plants, local wildlife. What simple measures or installations can we put in place that could just very easily support local biodiversity? So there's not just IONOS, but there's also other data center operators that have that in mind. And the primary one is that we can support increased insect populations by just having bee bug insect hotels on site. It's a low cost measure, but can have a big impact.

Joe - 00: 18:38: Yeah, that's a hugely important one, especially for the UK, which has seen some quite precipitous insect number drops. Very to hear that. Okay, awesome. So I want to give you space to mention some of the other aspects. I think I shoehorned you a bit there into the environmental challenges. Specifically, you did also mention you work with the AFB. But I think one area which was new to me from your introduction that I hadn't appreciated a whole bunch was the employee engagement aspect. I guess what we were just saying about consumers and their exposure to the data centers demand to a certain extent be true for employees of owners as well. Obviously, I don't know whether the vast majority of the company is going into day on day. How does this thread follow through to your employees and the employee engagement piece?

Ran - 00: 19:14: We have a really strong focus on diversity and inclusion Ionos like, and it's so important for the people who work here. We're a very diverse company. We have more than 60 different nationalities that work ironos. And starting with the data first to show like, how we've improved over the last year. So since about 2018, I think in 2018 we had 45 nationalities and today we've got more than 60. In terms of gender diversity, I think in 2018, we had about 18.5% women in management and today it's more than 24%. So still not perfect. There's still a long way to go, but it's slowly moving in the right direction.

Joe - 00: 19:53: Sure. And I like in particular that what you said there was women in management and not just women at the company in general.

Ran - 00: 19:57: Exactly.

Joe - 00: 19:58: That's great. Numbers move up in particular.

Ran - 00: 20:01: Yeah, I mean, women at the company is higher. It's closer to about 30%. It's moving in the right direction. It's not perfect, but there's momentum there. And the momentum exists because for the last three or four years we've had a strong focus on diversity and inclusion. So firstly, we've made ourselves accountable. We have a republic signatory to something called the Charter of Diversity, which means every year we will publish about our diversity efforts for our parent company. We actually have a head of diversity in place with a team responsible for driving those efforts. In addition, we really focus on making employees aware about diversity and inclusion. If you create awareness, then obviously and we create awareness through we have an annual event called Diversity Days. Essentially what we do is we crowdsource ideas and topics from all the different employees and we will have a two to three day event where we have like webinars presentations, quizzes, in-person, birtual events, just on all various aspects of diversity. I think what that does is firstly, you're educating, you're creating awareness, but we're also then giving a platform to all those different diverse groups, our company, to talk about topics that matter to them and giving everybody else an awareness of that. That's also complemented by a lot of different diversity trainings, unconscious bias, inclusive language, gender diversity. And another aspect is as well that I mentioned Diversity Days as a platform for those groups, but we also have a lot of diversity affinity groups. So LGBTQ, international community groups related to different ages where all those different groups can come together. They essentially do all of their own educational awareness initiatives throughout the year. And we also have something called a Women Explore initiative which is essentially mentoring program for up and coming female talent in the organization. And then every year we'll have a group of about 30 to 50 women who are a part of this and they are supported by role models and mentors. The goal is to mentor them so we can hopefully one day have increased the proportion of women and management at the company. But to end on that, that was like a brief summary of all of the different diversity initiatives we have. One thing that I really love and that I'm a part of this year, is that we've actually set a target for all of our managers. We're making diversity and inclusion trainings mandatory. So by the end of the year, we want to have 80% of our leaders trained on diversity and inclusion. And that's where now we've accepted like you're a manager, you're a leader, diversity and inclusion is part of your job and, yeah, we're going to be rolling that out over the course of the year.

Joe - 00: 22:44: That's excellent to hear, as well as the programs to ensure that training and mentorship from within to reach the higher ranks rather than hiring else is always very exciting to hear in the tech industry broadly, which encourages very rapid job transitions. So that's wonderful. What should customers be looking for to their cloud providers? If I'm a customer and I care about sustainability of my cloud infrastructure, what should I be looking for?

Ran - 00: 23:05: Yeah, so it's important for companies to have long term targets. So net zero and climate neutral, carbon, negative, positive, those are all important, but companies shouldn't just be looking for, is there a long term, 2040, 50 target. Those are important, I'm not downplaying that, but they really need to be supported by shorter term targets. And what are the actual initiatives and measures that have happened in the last years will also happen in the short to medium term. That's really important for me and I think maybe that's where those longer term targets can be impressive, like on paper. But, yeah, it's easy to say you're going to do something 20 years from now, what's actually happening at the current moment, so that would be one thing for me. Also. Secondly, when we're discussing the carbon offsets aspect is customers should really look for what's actually happening in the company's direct operations. Is it renewable electricity, solar panels? Essentially all those different examples of initiatives I mentioned IONOS. So tree planting initiatives are good, supporting forest regeneration, those are excellent. But in a part, if company doesn't have sustainability initiatives in their direct operations, it's kind of paying to solve a solution somewhere else in a different country. Yeah, so it's not bad, but it needs to be both, not one or the other. It shouldn't just be a long term target, should be short term and long term. It shouldn't just be carbon offsets, it should be direct operations, annual value chains also look for data, but I'm a sustainability manager, so sustainability data is my life. I see data, I'm happy. Whether it's improving, deteriorating, gives us something to work from, that's something a customer should be looking for, that transparency of. Is this company willing to tell you if they're improving deteriorate? Even if the company performance is going down, I think customers should still be value that the company is being transparent or share this data.

Joe - 00: 25:06: That's one maybe even more so than positive results.

Ran - 00: 25:08: Right.

Joe - 00: 25:09: Like it means a lot when they're publishing that. Yeah, cool. So bearing in mind what you said there about what you consider customers should be looking for now and how they're thinking about their operations today, obviously not delaying everything to the future and putting off those future goals, as we said. But what does sustainable to look like in the next five to ten years. What do you think the perceptions and expectations of people will be for companies like IONOS in five to ten years time?

Ran - 00: 25:32: One kind of sentence that I always hear, kind of like rubs me the wrong way a little bit is when people are like, sustainability is becoming more important. And I've kind of heard that for the last 15 years or 20 years, right, sustainability is becoming more important. And I'm like, yes, it's always been important. It's always been becoming more important. But the scope of stakeholders and the people that are becoming more aware is changing and I think that will continue to expand. We'll still continue to hear 5, 10 years from now, sustainability is becoming more important. But those severe impacts of climate change, the economic impacts will become more severe and apparent. And then that's where I mentioned that the preconceptions of where people are like, our sustainability is nice to have. I think a lot of companies will become aware this is a key means to preserve and create long term value of our company. So I mean that's from an expectations news aspect. That's where I think it will lead. So sustainability won't become more important as just the impacts of it will be very apparent to everybody, not just us. How else it will change is net zero targets. And that means you're really looking at you want carbon sustainability data from your suppliers and your value chain. But that is actually really difficult at the moment because that data doesn't exist. There's no standards, it's not accurate. So to achieve net zero you actually have to essentially work with your supply chain to purchase more carbon friendly raw materials products. But if you don't have the data in place, it's not actually possible. So that's when companies say net zero by 2040, by 2040 it might be possible. But that data is actually lacking at the moment. And I think essentially where needs to happen in the next five to ten years is so that companies can have more tangible net zero scope, three supply chain measures in place there actually needs to be this data available somewhere. And considering that the amount of data that is, it's not just the data from your suppliers. Those suppliers have suppliers and then their suppliers have suppliers. It's just this endless branching out Umbrel of data that all needs to be consolidated together. And whilst I'm not an expert on this, I'm really intrigued by the possibilities of Green Ledgers or the Blockchain to somehow bring all that data together in an online form somewhere where it's readily accessible by companies to actually create tangible measures. I hope it's not too abstract for some of the audience members to understand, but it's all about improving the quality of that data so we can create actual tangible measures to move forward. I mean, in terms of people's expectations, that's what one aspect is the data. I think. In terms of actual data center sustainability, the next 5, 10 years, energy efficiency, technology and measures, they kind of move so fast, it's almost I don't even think it's possible to envision what a data center will look like ten years from now, but I think there's going to be an increased focus on water efficiency, biodiversity. I think by 2030, a lot of data center operators will have 100% renewable electricity or having completely moved away from diesel emission based backup generators to maybe battery powered ones or biofuel. And then once those aspects are in place, then you could say all of those data centers are actually climate neutral for their own operations. And then what comes next is a continued focus on energy, water, biodiversity, and other aspects that I can't even imagine yet. One aspect that's being talked about is reusing heat energy within data centers. In ten years, that could be one aspect. Data centers create heat, and that heat obviously just goes into the atmosphere.

Joe - 00: 29:29: It's like wasted or into water for cooling.

Ran - 00: 29:31: Exactly. Local governments, national governments can create the infrastructure, whether that can be returned to the local energy grids and can be sent to other locations for heating purposes. So, yeah, circular energy heat transfer is essentially what they're calling it. But the current moment, the infrastructure doesn't exist in place. So a lot of data center operators would like to do that, but without actual infrastructure in place, it's more of a future long term consideration.

Joe - 00: 29:57: Yeah, it's really interesting, actually. This one's completely out there. I think you're talking about ideas like district heating, where you have like yeah. And then data centers keys into that. But I think I saw recently there's now a swimming pool in the UK that's heated by a data center underneath it or something like that. All kinds of baffling ideas for that. I think that is a really exciting area because it just kind of gets to what you were saying earlier about the importance of looking to companies like direct contributions. If a company is thinking about like, hey, we are producing something here and we should reframe that from waste into how can we use this in its current form? That kind of thinking just shows that they're taking it seriously, right, which is very exciting to me. Well, I think we're coming up on times it's been a wonderful overview of all sustainability and you're doing you've already shared a little bit about some of the things in the future you're most excited about. But in terms of the future, for a technical angle, to go to your point about green ledgers, is there any technology right on the horizon? Anything that you think is really going to elevate the sustainability game from a technological perspective that you're excited about?

Ran - 00: 30:55: Well, I jump on the AI bandwagon, everybody else, and I think there's already some good solid examples out there. I'm interested in seeing how potentially data models AI could be used to improve energy efficiency within the data centers. So something that we've already actually looked at in the past and done some pilot projects. But I think now, obviously in the last five years, and obviously software technology is vastly improving. So I think that's something that we could be potentially interested in coming back to building up data models of our data centers, all the different variables, how can we leverage that to even further improve upon our energy efficiency?.

Joe - 00: 31:36: Awesome. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Ran. This has been wonderful. Thank you for joining me today.

Ran - 00: 31:41: Yeah, thanks for your time, Joe. Appreciate it.

Joe - 00: 31:44: Beyond the Screen. An IONOS podcast. To find out more about IONOS and how we're the go to source for cutting edge solutions and web development, visit ionos.com and then make sure to search for IONOS in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Don't forget to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at IONOS, thank for listening.

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