Cloud computing can help an organization stay on track with its environmental sustainability targets – if paired with a careful analysis of its cloud providers and strategy through an environmental lens, Gartner Analyst Ed Anderson said during last week's Gartner IT Symposium 2022.

Amid record rises of its clients' interests in sustainability, Gartner's cloud research community group saw potential in studying topics like multicloud, hybrid cloud, edge computing, and cloud-native modernization. But it saw a bigger possibility around cloud sustainability because "we realized we didn't have a great answer for this question," Anderson said.

The thesis question Gartner adopted asks if technologies like cloud computing are helping or hurting an organization's sustainability ambitions. "Hopefully, you're asking that question broadly and generally about your own practices, the technologies you're using, the vendors you're working with," Anderson noted.

In the case of cloud computing, fortunately, "there's a great answer. The answer is yes. Cloud helps in your sustainability ambitions," he said. But "unfortunately, there's also another answer, which is no. It doesn't help."

In reality, the answer is dependent on the way an enterprise uses the cloud and which specific cloud providers and services it chooses. This helped the market research firm narrow its inquiry to ask how cloud vendor relationships help or hurt an organization's sustainability targets. "Does it help you or hurt you to work with a vendor like Microsoft? Or a vendor like IBM? Or a vendor like Oracle?" Anderson said.

As cloud becomes standard in modern business, it presents an immense opportunity to help tackle net-zero emissions goals for companies in all industries because carbon emissions resulting from cloud usage typically fall into a company's scope 3 emissions category under purchased goods and services. As cloud providers lower the environmental impact of their operations and infrastructure, those savings trickle down to the organizations that use those clouds as well.

That means "sustainability is not an attribute you can outsource," and companies shouldn't blindly trust providers to operate sustainably, Anderson said. "You'll always have a responsibility in this. That's why it's so important that you have a mechanism to understand how your providers are operating."

Anderson recommends two main ways for enterprises to evaluate cloud vendors' sustainability.

The first is a quantitative assessment that looks at vendors' performance against key environmental metrics like energy consumption, water use, and embodied carbon in infrastructure. Most cloud providers have environmental metrics available in some capacity online, but Anderson warned, "These are hard to understand and interpret. You have to have a good sense for what these metrics mean."

As an important companion to quantitative assessments, he stressed qualitative cloud vendor assessments backed by evidence of metrics tracked over time. "Look for evidence that [cloud providers] are actually tracking that and making progress against goals and strategies," he said.

In terms of supply chain, it's common to hear that cloud providers have high standards for their suppliers, but Anderson suggested looking for audit reports of those suppliers to ensure they're operating ethically. "Are they really following sustainable principles?" he said.

"At Gartner, we've embraced this multi-dimensional definition of sustainability, largely along the lines of ESG constructs: environment, social, and governance," Anderson said. This includes the use of Earth's natural resources, "the people aspect" of social sustainability, and economic sustainability as it relates to governance.

The core promise behind implementing ESG is that healthy ecosystems centered on those three dimensions will create a healthy environment to support and foster an organization's growth. Therefore, "if any one of these is jeopardized, it jeopardizes the long-term growth and viability of your organization," Anderson explained.

From that perspective, sustainability is far broader than asking if a company is polluting the planet, emitting carbon into the atmosphere, or accelerating climate change. "It's about operating in a way that creates a durable and enduring business model so you can continue to support the growth of your organization by fostering growth in the ecosystems in which you operate," he said.