Cloud computing promises to bring advanced capabilities and efficiency to financial institutions, but it’s also an important tool to help them meet ambitious climate-related goals.

Data centers are energy hogs, so transitioning away from on-premise servers can be a boon for financial firms’ climate goals. UBS just underscored that potential by announcing that moving from its own private data centers to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform reduced the energy consumption of some workloads by nearly a third.  

The two firms also co-created an application programming interface (API) that recommends ways to schedule heavy workloads for times when clean or low-carbon sources of electricity are most available. The open-source software is available for other firms to use.  

This is the second recent example of a big financial institution teaming up with a cloud giant to co-launch software: Banco Santander and Google have partnered to sell technology that makes it easier to migrate from mainframes to the cloud. 

Ultimately, UBS plans to have more than 50% of its applications running on Microsoft’s cloud within five years.