Carbon emissions to be among top three criterion for choosing a cloud vendor by 2025

Cloud service providers’ carbon footprints could play a critical role for them to attract clients in the next few years, Gartner predicted in a report.   

The report said that by 2025 the carbon footprints of hyper-scale cloud services will be among the top important factors for cloud purchasing decisions.

Sustainability has been a keyword for enterprises over the past few years, in 2019, more than 90% of the S&P 500 Index companies had published sustainability reports citing their priorities towards environmental, social and governance needs, according to the governance and accountability institute.

“Hyperscalers are aggressively investing in sustainable cloud operations and delivery, aspiring to eventually achieve net-zero emissions within the decade, or sooner,” said Ed Anderson, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. 

According to Gartner, the top ten largest cloud providers by revenue accounted for 70% of all IT spending on cloud infrastructures. Cloud sustainability is expected to start with these cloud vendors, who are also some of the world’s largest data centre operators and arguably play the most important role in reducing IT-related carbon emissions.

“Sustainability metrics and workload placement tools are still immature and not always transparent, making it difficult for organisations to fully and accurately assess true sustainability impacts of their cloud usage today,” pointed out Anderson. 

Most companies have announced their own sustainability initiatives in the recent past, Earlier last week, SAP India had partnered with the Energy Research Institute to work on sustainability solutions, while in November, Telecommunications company Airtel formed a committee of board members solely dedicated to ESG initiatives. The company plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50.2% by 2031, as compared to 2021. 

October last year saw a barrage of sustainability initiatives from big tech companies globally, just a few days before the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (nicknamed COP26) Glasgow, Scotland which took place on October 31.