In a recent study, 93% of UK companies stated that sustainability is increasing in priority, while 83% admited that their organization needs to step up.
Sustainability teams are swamped, and integration of sustainability into a wide range of IT elements often gets relegated down the priority list. Adding to that, constraints surrounding cloud computing costs and the volume of usage data are hindering efforts to identify key focus areas for sustainability efforts.
With cloud architecture arises the opportunity to work with technology providers who can offer strategic expertise as well as supply environmentally-friendly and efficient solutions. Indeed, just because the cloud offers sustainability drivers, does not mean that it’s a given that the customer’s goals will be met. This is where the right technology and the right partnership are a must for tech teams.
The cloud’s advantages
At its core, the cloud promotes efficiency. While most on-premises data centers often suffer from underutilized servers, excessive energy consumption and high cooling requirements, cloud service providers operate at large scale, allowing them to optimize resource usage and dramatically reduce waste.
Key benefits include:
- Reduced emissions: Large cloud providers invest heavily in renewable energy and energy-efficient infrastructure. By migrating workloads, organizations can reduce their Scope 2 emissions.
- Optimized resource utilisation: Cloud platforms use virtualization and advanced workload orchestration to ensure computing resources are only used when needed.
- Less hardware waste: Adopting cloud architecture helps reduce the need for frequent hardware refresh cycles.
- Smarter scaling: Businesses can scale resources up or down based on current need, avoiding the energy waste associated with overprovisioning.
Potential, but not automatic
And yet, while moving to the cloud offers sustainability potential, the reality is, there is no automatic guarantee of greener operations. Poorly designed architectures, inefficient workloads, and unmanaged consumption can lead to excessive energy usage, spiraling cloud costs, overprovisioned resources and limited visibility into carbon impact—this is where the expertise of the right IT vendor becomes indispensable.
The ideal IT vendor plays a strategic role in aligning a business’s operations with their sustainability goals. Their ability to account for both performance and environmental impact in design, optimization and security can put a company on the right path to achieving better sustainability outcomes.
The right vendor should be able to demonstrate:
- Sustainability-driven strategy that analyzes current infrastructure and business goals to recommend a growth strategy aligned with lower energy consumption via energy-efficient cloud locations, low-carbon architectures and appropriately-sized workloads.
- Efficient architecture that achieves reductions in both carbon footprint and operational costs, with storage tiers and lifecycle policies, compute utilization, backup and disaster recovery footprints.
- Responsibility at every step of the digital supply chain – carbon-neutral and renewable energy commitments, transparency in emissions reporting, sustainable data center designs and long-term environmental roadmaps.
- Confident impact reporting through cloud carbon tracking tools, energy efficiency dashboards, ESG reporting frameworks and compliance with global sustainability standards (ISO, GRI, TCFD).
- No security trade-off: Offer advanced security controls that reduce the need for excess infrastructure, manual processes, and duplicated systems.
A sustainability-driven IT vendor offers environmental and commercial advantages through lower operational costs, greater regulatory readiness, and stronger business resilience, helping companies to strengthen their brand reputation as well as draw top talent who prioritize working for responsible organizations.So whether you are providing cloud migration, SaaS adoption or even AI investments, you should therefore consider adding sustainability goals as a bow in your arsenal, and prove that you can truly bring about sustainable transformation and commitment to long-term partnerships.
