Emissions to guide cloud buying decisions by 2025

The carbon emissions of the major hyperscale cloud services providers will become a top three criterion for cloud purchase decisions by 2025, Gartner has predicted.

The research firm believes that cloud sustainability initiatives will start with the leading cloud providers, which represent some of the world’s largest data centre operators and the some of the IT industry’s largest contributors to carbon emissions.

“Leading providers of cloud infrastructure and platform services are increasingly focusing on how they can disrupt higher-level business, compliance, societal and environmental issues,” Gartner distinguished research vice president Ed Anderson said.

“Hyperscalers are aggressively investing in sustainable cloud operations and delivery, aspiring to eventually achieve net zero emissions within the decade, or sooner. Gartner expects increased availability of tools that help organisations calculate and reduce their carbon emissions through effective use of cloud services, similar to tools that assist in optimising cloud spending today.”

Anderson noted that the top 10 largest cloud providers by revenue collectively account for 70% of all IT spending on cloud infrastructure, platform and application services.

“While essentially all cloud providers have sustainability initiatives in place, their progress in meeting carbon reduction goals and strategies for achieving net zero carbon emissions varies wildly,” he said.

“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.”

Gartner believes that pressure from customers to meet environmental targets will meanwhile prompt the more progressive hyperscalers to include their sustainability posture in company disclosures, compliance and reporting, helping them differentiate from the competition.

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