clean-IT: Towards Sustainable Digital Technologies

Digital transformation is opening new opportunities across sectors to reduce waste and improve efficiency through solutions such as predictive maintenance, smart supply chains, or digital twins. Data centers play a key role in this transformation as they provide the underlying IT infrastructure for companies to interconnect, migrate to the cloud, and digitalize their processes and services. Despite the expansion of the digital economy, investments in energy efficiency measures by the data center industry have helped to avoid a spike in resource consumption. The Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures in Germany, which was founded under the umbrella of the eco Association in 2018, has the goal of raising the level of knowledge and understanding of decision makers in politics and industry about the importance of digital infrastructure. Two of the eco Association’s and the Alliance’s demands for policy development are a) Accelerate the energy transition and the expansion of renewable energies, and b) Create a framework for systematic heat recovery – both of which relate closely to the question of how sustainable data centers are able to be.

Dr. Béla Waldhauser is the Chief Executive Officer of Telehouse Deutschland GmbH since 2012 and the head of the integrated operational business of KDDI and Telehouse in Germany since April 2014. Between 2007-2012 he was the Managing Director of Global Switch in Germany. Prior to this he held the same position at TeleCity where he was responsible for TeleCity’s German operations for four years. He earned a degree in theoretical physics and began his professional career at Telenorma/Bosch Telecom. Following these early years he went on to GTS-Westcom and later to First Telecom as their Sales and Marketing Director. Dr. Béla Waldhauser is appointed as the spokesman for the Alliance to Strengthen the Digital Infrastructure in German since February 2018.