Ecological Sustainability Potential for Cloud solutions

Sammanfattning: First and foremost, this is a Master Thesis from two students at The Royal Institute of Technology, graduating with a Master in Science and Education. The thesis is investigating the development potential in intersection between cloud solutions, ecological sustainability and education. The digital sector is often mentioned as an enabler for sustainability which is one of the motivators for the authors to write about the above mentioned intersection. The digital sector could, with the right actions, directly enable a third of the emission reductions needed by 2030. Actions that can impact are for example to optimize and reduce the existing infrastructure in the digital sector (Falk & Gaffney et al., 2019). Cloud solutions can help to enable both reduction and optimization of infrastructure. This thesis presents development recommendations for cloud solutions at a world-wide telecom company. A demand analysis and literature search were made in the beginning of the process to gain knowledge about the Company and what research says about sustainability in cloud solutions. In order to develop recommendations, the authors limited the study to requirements that the Company have on all the products that is developed, called Generic Product Requirements. The study was further limited to six of the Generic Product Requirements with a connection to cloud or/and sustainability. The six chosen requirements served as a base for analysis and the final recommendations.The recommendations, served as the prototype of the thesis, is developed through an agile design process. In the design process, both an engineering and an pedagogical investigation have been made since the authors have had an interdisciplinary perspective from their education. The empirical data collection served as interviews, informal talks and literature search. For the engineering part of the data collection, 19 interviews were held with employees working with the requirements. In the design process, a pedagogical study has been done to gain knowledge of how three professional divisions view the intersection between cloud and ecological sustainability. Serving as the data collection for the pedagogical part, five interviews were held with approximations from the three divisions.The collected data was analyzed with different types of content analysis and Wenger’s theory about Communities of Practice. The result of the analysis served as a baseline for the prototype of this thesis. The prototype exists of eight recommendations for the Company aiming to increase the work with ecological sustainability within the Cloud department. The recommendations in the prototype have different level of detail. Some of them are very specifically related to one product requirement, while others regard more general proposals about the way of working at the Company. In order to create a possible way of implementing the recommendations, the importance of engagement and commitment from the employees is crucial.