Why Is Digital Getting Heavier and Heavier?

In just a few years, digital services have fundamentally changed in nature. What once fit into a few lines of code and a few megabytes now requires entire infrastructures, energy-hungry datacentres and saturated bandwidth. Increasingly rich applications, real-time data flows, ubiquitous multimedia content, proliferating collaborative tools…

Digital is growing heavier. And this growth is not without consequences — for the performance of your platforms, and for the environmental footprint of your organisation.

A Telling Set of Numbers

The digital sector now accounts for around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than civil aviation — and this share is growing steadily. Within businesses, IT concentrates a significant portion of this footprint: servers, workstations, networks, applications, storage…

But beyond the global figures, it is the underlying dynamic that should put IT managers on alert. Organisations’ digital consumption is not growing linearly. It is accelerating, driven by several converging phenomena.

The Drivers Behind Digital Inflation

The Data Explosion

Companies are generating and collecting exponential volumes of data. Application logs, business data, customer histories, IoT streams… Every interaction produces data. And every piece of data stored, replicated and backed up consumes energy — often far beyond its real value to the organisation.

Increasingly Heavy Interfaces

Modern applications are heavier than they have ever been. Bulky JavaScript frameworks, unoptimised multimedia assets, multiplied network requests… What the user perceives as a smooth experience often relies on dozens of resources loaded in parallel, from servers sometimes located on the other side of the world.

The Proliferation of Collaborative Tools

The widespread adoption of hybrid working has led to a proliferation of tools: messaging, video conferencing, project management, file sharing… Each tool generates its own streams, its own notifications, its own background synchronisations. The individual footprint of each employee has grown considerably.

Streaming and Video in the Workplace

Video has become the dominant format — both internally and externally. Online training, recorded meetings, marketing content… Video now accounts for the majority of global internet traffic, and its energy consumption is proportionally high.

The Concrete Consequences for Your Organisation

This digital inflation produces tangible effects that CIOs can no longer afford to ignore.

On platform performance. Overloaded applications, poorly sized databases, under-optimised infrastructures: the growing weight of digital directly translates into degraded response times, recurring incidents and accumulating technical debt.

On infrastructure costs. Storing more, processing more, transmitting more — all of this comes at a cost. Cloud bills soar when resource consumption is not actively managed. Digital sobriety then becomes a lever for economic optimisation as much as an environmental one.

On compliance and regulatory obligations. The European CSRD directive now requires a growing number of companies to measure and report their environmental footprint — including their digital one. IT is no longer just a cost centre: it is a full ESG responsibility perimeter.

Towards a Digital Sobriety Approach

Faced with these challenges, digital sobriety is not about reducing usage or stifling innovation. It is about consuming better — aligning digital resource consumption with the value actually produced.

A few concrete levers for IT managers:

Audit and rationalise the application portfolio. How many applications are actually being used in your organisation? How many dormant licences, functional duplicates and obsolete tools continue running in the background? A regular audit of the application portfolio is the first step in a sobriety approach.

Optimise storage and data management. Not all data deserves to be kept indefinitely. A data lifecycle policy — archiving, deletion, tiering — can significantly reduce the footprint of storage infrastructures.

Integrate eco-design into digital projects. From the design phase, technical choices can reduce the environmental impact of an application: lighter interfaces, optimised queries, reduced assets. Eco-design is not a constraint — it is a discipline that also improves perceived performance. Lùkla supports its clients in this approach: discover our digital eco-design and sustainable project methodology.

Measure to manage. You cannot reduce what you do not measure. Monitoring tools now make it possible to quantify the energy consumption of your infrastructures and identify the most energy-intensive components.

Conclusion

Digital is not going to get lighter on its own. The structural trend is towards increasing complexity, intensified usage and multiplied data. What can change is the way organisations choose to manage it.

For CIOs, digital sobriety is an opportunity: to regain control over consumption that is often invisible, to optimise costs that have been endured for too long, and to position IT as a responsible actor in the company’s environmental strategy.