Cloud hyperscaler carbon emissions expected to drive purchasing decisions by 2025: Gartner

Organisations will increasingly consider a vendor’s carbon emissions in their cloud purchasing decisions within a few years, according to research from Gartner.

The research firm said carbon emissions of cloud hyperscalers will be a top three criterion in cloud purchase decisions by 2025.

Gartner said that the top ten largest cloud providers by revenue accounted for 70 percent of all IT spending on cloud infrastructure, platform and application services, so the cloud sustainability initiatives should start with them.

However all the leading cloud providers, while all of them have sustainability initiatives in place, their carbon emissions reduction goals vary wildly.

“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,” Gartner research vice president Ed Anderson 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.

“As stakeholders continue to push organisations to improve their sustainability posture, the more progressive providers will share their sustainability information publicly. Increasingly, stakeholder pressure will prompt them to include it in company disclosures, compliance and reporting.”

Gartner added the prediction is based on growing levels of environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities and reporting among enterprises. Sustainability programs specifically saw a 90 percent increase in investments from 2017 to early 2020.

“Leading providers of cloud infrastructure and platform services are increasingly focusing on how they can disrupt higher-level business, compliance, societal and environmental issues,” 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.”