Lendlease Podium | Celebrating World Environment Day: Lendlease Reduces Carbon Footprint By Ditching Data Centres For Google Cloud

It’s a bold move that averts reliance on storing data in power-hungry data centres - and effectively aligns with the latest mantra of this year’s World Environment Day (WED).

“The theme of WED this year is #onlyoneearth, and for all of us this is a good opportunity to look at the small, or big changes we can make to get on the journey of improvement,” according to Lendlease Digital Product Group’s chief software architect, Ciaran Hennessy.

“Our move to Cloud has been an aspiration for us for the last decade, and now that we’re on that journey - and seeing some of the potential sustainability outcomes - it just reinforces that we’re on the right path.” 

The international real estate group recently partnered with Google Cloud in a bid to transform the construction and operation of buildings and cities around the world. 

Under the plan, Lendlease is moving to the cloud by migrating its mission-critical enterprise workloads, including its data-intense CAD platforms, in-house project excellence platform, Oli, and its Oracle-based eFinance system. 

The partnership also sees the advancement of the company’s IT strategy, and the integration of AI, machine learning, and smart data features into the Lendlease Podium software platform. 

Lendlease Digital CEO, Bill Ruh, said Lendlease is on track to exit its eight on-premise data centres across four continents this year, with Google Cloud selected as its only cloud services provider. 

What’s more, Ruh said the move away from managing data is a major company milestone - and one that will have lasting benefits on the environment and achieving sustainability goals.

“At Lendlease, Mission Zero defines and guides our business strategy and supporting initiatives. The move from managing data in our data centres to Google Cloud is one key way we’ll be reducing the carbon footprint for Lendlease. Google Cloud offers the greenest cloud in the market, and it’s these shared values and deliberation which ensure a strong partnership.”

Indeed, it’s these latest sustainability measures - and countless others undertaken by Lendlease - that continue to drive home the message of environmental purpose and vision, according to Hennessy.  

“Lendlease has a long history of thinking about sustainability on several fronts, and this is what our founder, Dick Dusseldorp, had to say: ‘To leave our mark on the cities of this country, that is our purpose,’ and part of this is our drive to create places that are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable,” Hennessy said. 

“We have set some pretty aggressive goals around environmental outcomes with our commitment to be a 1.5 degrees Aligned Company. And for us, this means getting our business and project to a Net Carbon scope 1&2 by 2025, and all the way to Absolute zero by 2040; and changing the way we use digital technologies is a big part of this.” 

Certainly, it’s an environmental policy that already resonates and aligns with this year’s WED vision, which affirms: “In the universe are billions of galaxies. In our galaxy are billions of planets. But there is only One Earth.”