Measuring Digital Carbon Footprint at la Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie: a tool to reduce the environmental impact of IT

At a time when the ecological transition is becoming an essential priority, organizations are facing a major challenge: reducing their digital carbon footprint. In an increasingly connected world, the environmental impact of information and communication technologies can no longer be ignored.

In 2022, the government announced an energy sobriety plan, and in this context, la Caisse d’Assurance Maladie (the National Health Insurance Fund) mandated its departments to integrate energy sobriety into their roadmap. Within the IT Department, this mission has taken the form of developing a digital sobriety program, with the initial step of carrying out a digital carbon footprint.

This approach aims to quantify, analyze, and ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to digital activities. The digital carbon footprint not only allows for an accurate inventory but also for identifying the most effective levers for action to reduce the environmental impact of IT equipment and digital uses.

To successfully carry out this large-scale project, la CNAM chose to rely on Sopht, a Green IT Ops solution, with operational support from Devoteam.

In this article, Franck Kammerlocher, head of the digital sobriety program at la CNAM, and Jean Dominique Blume, project director, take stock of the project and explore the challenges, methods and benefits of carrying out a digital carbon footprint within a large administration.

How did you initiate the digital sobriety process?

Firstly, we worked to define the scope of digital sobriety at la CNAM. We identified 4 projects:

• The measurement with the digital carbon footprint.
• The digital sobriety of workstations within la CNAM and the 500 health insurance organizations, representing over 100,000 workstations.
• Data centers
• Integrating responsible digital best practices into IT projects, particularly eco-design. This last part began in April 2024

How is the digital carbon footprint the starting point for this transformation?

To begin with, we must know where we are starting from in the subject of digital sobriety. The digital carbon footprint allows us to take stock of our initial situation, a measurement that will provide us with an element of comparison for the future.

This assessment covers two areas: workstations (PC, screen) across the entire CNAM network and the 6 data centers. This includes all data center equipment, IT hardware, power supply, cooling, etc.

What are the lessons from this first assessment?

It took us about 6 months to establish this assessment. Initially, we thought it would be faster, but the reality is that the digital carbon footprint is still a new subject. The state of the art is not fixed, and the methodologies are not entirely mature. On our side, inventorying and formatting the data was considerable. In hindsight, we realize that imagining obtaining a result in 3 months was very optimistic.

The choice of a platform proved wise in this dynamic context. This approach allows us to benefit from continuous updates of the tool, thus avoiding the complications related to maintaining other types of solutions. Thanks to their integration into a scalable platform, the sustainability and adaptability of our data are ensured, a rare advantage among the available options. 

What are the specific needs of an organization like la CNAM?

Our infrastructure includes 6 data centers spread across different sites, 500 locations with their own organizational structures, and more than 100,000 workstations. This complexity required adaptations of the platform to integrate some of our specificities.

We requested adding features to better reflect our reality, particularly regarding data centers. This included consideration of cooling equipment and a more detailed categorization of hardware such as servers and racks.

Devoteam played a crucial role in this process. Their expertise allowed us to clarify our needs and interact effectively with Sopht to implement these features. Their support was particularly valuable in adapting the platform to our specific requirements.

What did you expect from a partner like Devoteam on this project?

Given our limited internal resources for digital sobriety, we needed a partner who could support several crucial aspects of the project. This partner needed to be able to:

• Structure and coordinate the entire project.
• Collect inventory data from the various CNAM teams, covering our 100,000 workstations and 6 data centers.
• Consolidate and format this information appropriately.
• Work with Sopht to efficiently integrate this data into the platform.

This mission required not only technical skills but also significant interpersonal qualities. Patience and diplomacy were essential to integrate harmoniously into the CNAM organization and obtain the necessary time and attention from interlocutors who were often very busy with other priorities.

Given the complexity of our infrastructure and our organizational constraints, this role of facilitator and coordinator was crucial to successfully implementing our digital carbon footprint project.

What were your main challenges when establishing your digital carbon footprint, and how did you address them?

Establishing our digital carbon footprint presented several significant challenges:

Inventory Accuracy

Our priority was to ensure the accuracy of our inventory. Devoteam worked closely with our repository managers to validate equipment, statuses, and purchase dates. We realized that the quality of our inventory data was improvable, as these tools had no concrete use before. Today, this data has a direct application, allowing us to identify significant improvement areas, such as managing our 300,000 screens.

Carbon Impact Assessment

We relied on the Product Carbon Footprints (PCF) provided by the manufacturers for each type of equipment. Devoteam conducted extensive research and coordination with various stakeholders, including manufacturers, to obtain the information needed to power the platform.

Limitations of current methods

While PCFs consider the impact of manufacturing, they need granularity. For example, they do not differentiate between varying server capacities regarding storage or CPU. We recognize the need for a more precise methodology that incorporates both the impact of manufacturing and specific equipment sizing.

Overall methodological challenge

We are faced with the diversity of existing methodologies, which only partially covers some of the necessary aspects. Sopht experts are working on identifying new approaches to improve assessment accuracy.

Managing Uncertainty

We recognize that measuring carbon footprints involves inherent uncertainty. We aim to track our decarbonization impact with a stable, long-term measurement method.

We aim to establish a digital carbon footprint that, while imperfect, will provide a solid foundation. This foundation will guide our efforts to reduce environmental impact.

What was the added value of Devoteam’s support?

The scale and complexity of our digital carbon footprint project made it essential to use an external partner. The scale of our organization and the multitude of stakeholders involved created a particularly demanding environment. The diversity of teams and the cross-functional nature of the project further intensified the project management challenges.

In this context, Devoteam proved to be a crucial partner. Their expertise enabled us to effectively address the challenges related to the animation and management of this complex project. Their ability to navigate our organizational structure and unite the different stakeholders was decisive for the initiative’s success.

What are the first results of the digital carbon footprint?

We are within the standards of other companies on the distribution of carbon impacts at the IT level.

Data centers represent less than 10%, workstations 90%. We wrongly imagine that data centers are more consuming, but on a company scale, workstations have more impact. This is the first lesson of this assessment: buying less workstation equipment is a stronger lever for decarbonization than working on the energy efficiency of data centers. However, this does not mean that we should not act at the data center level, but working on purchasing policies and equipment lifespan is a very strong lever. Purchasing more responsibly equipment that has less impact is a significant challenge in the decarbonization program.

This also means extending the lifespan of equipment. This is a real issue because we come up against the purchasing paradigms of public bodies. The cheapest equipment is often complex to repair, more susceptible to breakdowns, and it may become obsolete more quickly because it has fewer capabilities. Following this initial assessment, we have therefore added responsible digital clauses to calls for tender to increase the lifespan of the equipment. IT equipment must be repairable, upgradeable, and meet the manufacturing criteria of eco-labels.

Are you considering the recycling option?

We are indeed thinking about the possibilities offered by the circular economy. We cannot buy refurbished equipment from our suppliers, but we are studying reconditioning internally, for example, by reconditioning a developer workstation for office use. We also have to reconsider the logic of depreciation at 5 years: if equipment still works after 5 years, why change it?

How do we identify the most effective decarbonization levers?

For example, calculating the carbon footprint and finding the right levers for decarbonization is not yet an exact science. We know that extending the lifespan, upgrading equipment, and repairing contribute to reducing the environmental impact, but all stakeholders in the subject are groping their way forward.

The public authorities have set a framework with obligations, but they are sometimes impossible to apply operationally. 20% of the fleet should be reconditioned, which is incompatible with our security requirements. Ideally, there should be a global approach to the subject at the level of public procurement to take digital sobriety into account beyond the cost and technical aspects.

What are the next steps for your project?

Our goal is to continue improving inventory quality by cleaning the data and ensuring its reliability. We aim to complete the scope of the inventory, targeting 100,000 inventoried positions out of the total 130,000. More generally, we want to move from a static inventory based on fleet managers’ declarations to a dynamic view.

The second topic is industrialization. Automating data collection, formatting and injection will allow measurement at regular intervals and make the platform a tool for managing decarbonization. We will also expand the scope of hardware to include mobiles, tablets, printers and local servers. The question focuses on allocating carbon impacts by project or business to understand whether environmental impact is proportional to application importance. By analyzing these impacts, we can identify strategies to reduce carbon footprint when possible.

We are also waiting for Sopht version 2 and the integration of the requested features, such as organizational structures, different types of data center hardware, etc. V2 will also bring more dashboards and allow us to better monitor what is injected into the platform. Devoteam’s support allowed us to challenge Sopht on our needs; the Sopht teams were attentive, and we worked in partnership.