Gartner: Don't Blindly Trust Cloud Sustainability Messaging

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders need to comprehensively evaluate potential cloud service providers in terms of their sustainability initiatives and transparency, not based on providers’ public messaging, according to a recent Gartner report. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders need to comprehensively evaluate potential cloud service providers in terms of their sustainability initiatives and transparency, not based on providers’ public messaging, according to a recent Gartner report. The report identifies seven material issues relating to potential cloud providers’ sustainability that I&O leaders should uniquely evaluate — goals, targets, and timelines; energy efficiency; renewable energy use; greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon offsets; circularity capabilities; water usage efficiency; and tools and services. According to Miguel Borrega, senior director analyst at Gartner and an author of the report, GHG scope 3 emissions pose the biggest challenge when choosing sustainable cloud services. Scope 3, or supply chain, emissions tend to be the most difficult to control and reduce, and providers typically don’t include the category in cloud use carbon footprint tools, he explained in an email to SDxCentral. The lack of available data makes it difficult for I&O leaders to accurately evaluate providers because “how the cloud service provider is managing and reducing its scope 3 emissions is a great indicator of its sustainability maturity,” Borrega said. And while scope 3 is certainly difficult for cloud providers to influence, it’s still very possible with, for example, thoughtful design and material choices or supply chain management and engagement. “This includes [cloud providers’] circular economy practices and how they design platforms to optimize circular outcomes, such as extending the life of platforms and reusing and recycling materials,” Borrega explained. While Gartner urges an increased focus on environmental sustainability, Borrega recognizes that the decision to work with a cloud provider is dependent on much more than a provider’s sustainability goals and practices. “Enterprises are migrating to the cloud for many good reasons: access to innovation, geographical location, agility and flexibility to provision computing resources, or cost savings just to name a few. The reality is that as of today, only few enterprises are doing so for sustainability reasons,” he explained. Moving to the cloud typically means an enterprise’s carbon footprint decreases, but Borrega sees those benefits as “largely incidental compared to other benefits [enterprises] can get from cloud providers at the moment.” However, this is slowly beginning to change. Borrega noted “a small but growing set of enterprises with ambitious or science-based GHG emission reduction targets that are starting to give more weight to the sustainability criteria into their strategic and service provider choices.”