Drive carbon reductions in cloud migrations with Sustainability insights in Azure Migrate

Introduction

As sustainability becomes a core priority for organizations worldwide, Azure Migrate now empowers customers to quantify environmental impact alongside cost savings when planning their cloud journey. With the new Sustainability Benefits capability in Azure Migrate's Business Case, customers can now view estimated emissions savings when migrating from on-premises environments to Azure — making sustainability a first-class consideration in cloud transformation.

Align with Global Sustainability Goals

With governments and enterprises racing to meet net-zero targets — including a 55% emissions reduction target by 2030 in the EU and net-zero goals in the US and UK by 2050 — cloud migration offers a meaningful path to emissions reduction.

With Azure’s carbon-efficient infrastructure powered by renewables and optimized energy efficiencies, customers can significantly reduce their datacenter carbon emissions by migrating to Azure. This feature brings those emissions reductions front and center by quantifying them transparently in your Azure Migrate workflows.

About Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free platform for migrating to and modernizing in Azure. It provides IT resource discovery, assessment, business case analysis, planning, migration, and modernization capabilities in a workload agnostic manner. You can run and monitor your migration/ modernization journey from a single, secure portal.

Currently, Azure Migrate's application aware experience supports the discovery of following workloads: Windows Server, Linux, SQL Server, .NET webapp on IIS, and Java on Tomcat running on various platforms including, VMware, Microsoft, Bare-metal, AWS EC2, GCP CE, and Xen.

Further, it will support migration assessments for Azure VM, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database, App Service Code, App Service Containers, and Azure Kubernetes Service. Last, it will support in-line Lift and Shift migration to Azure VM.

Quantify Emissions Reductions with Azure Migrate

The new Sustainability Benefits experience in Azure Migrate brings emissions awareness directly into the Business workflow, helping IT, finance, and sustainability teams align on decisions that drive both economic and environmental value.

With this release, customers can:

• View estimated carbon emissions (MtCO₂e) from their on-premises infrastructure, using a standardized calculation methodology based on compute, storage, and energy profiles.
• Compare projected Azure emissions side by side, based on Azure’s carbon-efficient infrastructure powered by renewables and optimized energy efficiency.
• See emissions reductions alongside cost savings in Business Case, enabling deeper, data-driven decision making.
• Visualize emissions reductions year on year as customers gradually move from their on-premises environments to Azure’s carbon efficient infrastructure.

How It Works: Methodology Highlights

The Azure Migrate methodology for calculating on-premises emissions is grounded in rigorous, Microsoft-approved standards, with validation from the Methodology Governance Council and CELA. This robust governance ensures that the calculations reflect a high level of precision and reliability. Sustainability benefits on Azure offer one of the most accurate and dependable estimations of on-premises emissions available today, providing customers with confidence in the insights that drive their sustainability decisions. The on-premises emissions are calculated using the following details -

• Compute and storage hardware configurations (e.g., number of cores, TB of storage)
• Power consumption estimates using TDP (Thermal Design Power) and industry-standard PUE values
• Carbon intensity factors based on the geographic location of the datacenter

Azure emissions are calculated using Microsoft’s internally approved carbon rate cards, which provide precise, validated emissions factors for each Azure SKU, directly reflecting the realities of Microsoft datacenter operations. These rate cards account for regional variations across datacenter geographies and are the trusted foundation behind multiple first-party tools, including Azure Carbon Optimizer. This ensures that the emissions insights provided are not only highly accurate but also fully aligned with Microsoft’s enterprise-wide sustainability standards.

Get Started

The Sustainability Benefits feature is now in public preview and available for use through the Azure Migrate portal.

• Check out this documentation for more details - https://aka.ms/sustainabilityWithAzureMigrate
• Learn more about Azure Migrate.