Carbon Footprint Crackdown: How Big Tech Is Fueling the GreenOps Revolution
- By CDOTrends editors
- May 23, 2024
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According to analyst group Gartner, 50% of organizations will adopt sustainability-enabled monitoring by 2026 to manage energy consumption and carbon footprint metrics for their hybrid cloud environments.
This is in response to pressure from investors, customers, regulators and governments, forcing organizations to adopt carbon neutrality and net zero goals by 2030.
For example, the Australian Government recently introduced legislation establishing the Net Zero Economy Authority to support the country's net zero transformation.
“Organizations have strong carbon reduction goals to achieve and expect their infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to launch sustainability initiatives that align their current IT carbon footprint with corporate goals,” said Padraig Byrne, vice president analyst at Gartner and Conference Chair of the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference held in Sydney in May 2024.
The 2024 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey revealed that 79% of Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) CIOs expected to direct the second largest amount of new or additional funding in 2024 towards cloud platforms, which increasingly makes the environmental sustainability of cloud a core responsibility for I&O leaders.
The survey gathered data from 2,457 respondents in 84 countries, including 87 in ANZ.
According to Gartner, reporting activities, energy usage, water efficiency, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in cloud and data centers will become new areas of IT management, resulting in new IT operating models (GreenOps) that will require new processes, capabilities and tools.
“I&O leaders and managed service providers will demand monitoring, analytical and generative AI services from software and cloud vendors to manage and optimize CO2e emissions and power consumption for reporting and IT management purposes,” said Byrne.
To satisfy this demand, monitoring vendors will evolve their portfolio of products. They will enable new capabilities to track CO2e and power consumption across different IT layers—data center, hardware, middleware and applications.
According to Gartner, this will provide analytical capabilities and insights to optimize every type of workload. However, there are several adoption challenges for sustainability-enabled monitoring.
Organizations that currently manage sustainability metrics use historical data and little to no real-time information, which can impact some real-time business decisions.
“Most relevant metrics aligned to net zero carbon are based on CO2e emissions and power consumption,” said Byrne.
“However, IT organizations don’t currently have the capability to gather this information directly. Some request it from their IT providers, but the quality and granularity of information at the data center and cloud account level aren't accurate enough to rely on for good management decisions."
Image credit: iStockphoto/Aurelie and Morgan David de Lossy