The carbon emissions of hyperscale cloud service providers will be a top three criterion in cloud purchase decisions by 2025, according to a report by Gartner Inc.

The report said that over 90 per cent of organisations have increased their investments in sustainability programs since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic compared to investments in 2017 as environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities and reporting witnessed growing levels of enterprise attention.

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

“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,” said Anderson.

The top 10 largest cloud providers (by revenue) accounted for 70 per cent of all IT spending on cloud infrastructure, platform and application services, according to Gartner.

Leading cloud providers are likely to lead cloud sustainability initiatives. These are some of the world’s largest data center operators and critical to reducing IT-related carbon emissions.

“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,” said Anderson. 

“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,” Anderson said.

“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,” Anderson added.

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