How Cvent lowers carbon emissions and provides sustainable meeting options using AWS

A recent survey of corporate travel managers and meeting planners across the United States, Canada, and several European countries reported that 55 percent of company respondents said their organization has a company-wide carbon emissions reduction target. However, only 9 percent have a target for company-hosted meetings and events.

The study published by the Global Business Travel Association and Cvent, a leading meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider, showcases the opportunity that companies have to reduce their carbon footprints. It also represents a tremendous opportunity to make travel and meetings more sustainable while improving bottom-line success. With more than five million meetings and events managed since its founding in 1999, this is especially significant to Cvent.

This is exactly why Cvent is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive sustainability through cloud technology for the benefit of its business and, of course, its customers.

Sustainability is a shared responsibility between customers and AWS. AWS fine-tunes the sustainability of the cloud, delivering efficient infrastructure, water stewardship, and sourcing renewable energy. Customers such as Cvent take ownership for sustainability by managing workloads efficiently, using scalable options like serverless architecture, and reducing the resources needed to fulfill their business needs.

The Climate Pledge: Amazon’s commitment to reach net zero

As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon (including AWS) is committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Furthermore, Amazon is on a path to power its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025, beating its original 2030 target. In addition, AWS works together with customers in three main ways to advance their sustainability efforts:

• migration: identifying and migrating workloads to the AWS Cloud reduces carbon footprint as compared to using on-premises data centers
• optimization: by using the sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, new and existing cloud customers can further reduce their carbon footprint and conserve energy through best practices for resource efficiency
• transformation: AWS customers use analytics and other services to solve sustainability challenges through the cloud. These range from using machine learning to optimize physical resource consumption to creating applications that track a product’s carbon footprint through the supply chain.

Such initiatives played a major factor in Cvent’s decision to migrate its data centers to AWS and adopt AWS best practices.

Migration: The start of Cvent’s AWS sustainability story

Cvent completed migration of its entire platform to AWS in 2022, gaining benefits such as a global flexible network, scalable infrastructure, and carbon emissions reduction. Studies by technology research group 451 Research have shown that AWS infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of US enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy efficient than the average in Europe. 451 Research also found that AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints compared with surveyed enterprise data centers.

AWS Well-Architected Framework: sustainability pillar

While undergoing migration, Cvent evaluated ways to reduce usage and improve workload efficiency, and it found this focus as being critical to sustainability. Further details on how resource optimization improves sustainability can be found in the sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The pillar provides design principles, operational guidance, best practices, potential trade-offs, and improvement plans that a customer can use to meet sustainability targets for their AWS workloads.

Cvent improved its operations by:

1. Moving to managed services

• Across a broad customer base, this helps raise resource utilization, which reduces the amount of infrastructure needed to support cloud workloads. In its AWS adoption, Cvent has used Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Amazon RDS services that Cvent has used include Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility; Amazon OpenSearch Service, which securely unlocks real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data; and Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a managed live streaming solution.

2. Using AWS Auto Scaling groups (ASGs) so that compute resources automatically scale in and out based on demand

• With AWS ASGs, Cvent provisions only those servers needed to meet its loads, an option that isn’t available with on-premises data centers.

3. Employing “schedule” tags to automatically power down resources when not needed, such as during weekends and off-hour periods

• Cvent uses Amazon EventBridge to build event-driven applications at scale; Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), a fully managed Pub/Sub service for application-to-application and application-to-person messaging; and AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, for resource scheduling. Instance Scheduler on AWS or AWS Systems Manager are other options.

4. Establishing automatic monitoring to remove resources that haven’t been used during given timeframes

The net result of Cvent’s alliance with AWS? As calculated by Cvent and AWS, Cvent has lowered its workload carbon emissions by 78 percent and is reducing 5-year carbon emissions by over 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e). For ongoing tracking, the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool gives organizations like Cvent the carbon emissions of their AWS accounts, while services like Amazon CloudWatch help track resource usage.

Transformation: a holistic approach to the sustainability of events

Cvent has also prioritized helping event organizers plan and execute more efficient in-person, virtual, and hybrid events.

For in-person events, Cvent is employing tools to aid sustainability, such as partnering with leading ride-sharing providers to reduce overall miles driven, and offering mobile event apps that reduce paper consumption. With the Cvent Supplier Network and Vendor Marketplace, planners can source both venues and vendors that promote sustainable practices. The company also has joined industry peers, including DRPG and Maritz Global Events, to help fund the beta version of the SAM web app, a carbon measurement tool. One of its features lets organizers to send delegates a link to measure their own travel, which can then be added to an event’s carbon output.

“At Cvent, we think about sustainability and environmental impact from both a corporate and customer perspective. From the corporate perspective, we consistently evaluate and adjust how we operate our business, and from a customer perspective, we look critically at how we can enhance our technology to help our customers run more sustainable event and travel programs.”

—David Quattrone, cofounder and chief technology officer, Cvent

By migrating its data centers to the cloud, embracing AWS Well-Architected principles, and applying technology to events themselves, Cvent is doing more than hosting a dialogue about the pressing issue. It’s contributing to a more sustainable future. Visit cvent.com to learn how you can incorporate sustainable practices into your events.

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Visit the Amazon Sustainability website to learn more about the actions that Amazon is taking to provide sustainable operations and reach net-zero carbon by 2040. Refer to the US, Europe, or Asia Pacific reports from 451 Research to understand how AWS data centers are more energy efficient and have lower carbon footprint than a typical on-premises corporate data center. Refer to the sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework for best practices on how to evaluate and optimize your cloud workloads.