Most public technology companies – from cloud services providers and data center operators to networking vendors and telecommunications giants – update stakeholders on their environmental impact data and their progress toward environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets each year.

As a technology buyer hoping to leverage your organization's purchasing power to support a sustainable future, what's the most efficient and meaningful way to approach these reports? And how can you use your vendors' ESG reports to further your organization's own sustainability goals?

Whether you're a prospective or existing customer, employee or investor, Gartner analyst Kristin Moyer recommends prioritizing areas of concern before examining tech vendors' ESG reports. This will help stakeholders determine how relationships with different tech vendors could impact their ability to meet sustainability goals.

According to Gartner research, common material issues are climate change; business ethics; diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I); human rights; and data privacy. But "you can't focus on everything," Moyer told SDxCentral. "You have to prioritize where you're going to focus and where you're going to invest."

After identifying their top material issues, decision-makers should turn to vendors' ESG reports and look at how each company approaches those areas. "If water positive is an important goal for an organization, but the vendor isn't doing very much around water, that would be a reason to consider looking at other providers instead," she said.

Specific areas to look for in ESG reports that address those common material issues are greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions progress, treatment of end-of-life equipment, resource circularity and renewable energy use. Before an enterprise moves to the cloud, Moyer said, it might "want to know what kind of energy the vendor is using for the cloud," as that will impact the company's environmental footprint.

While less obvious than hardware, software vendors also have significant environmental impacts, and their ESG reports are worth a look.

For software, Moyer recommends looking at the use of green software principles, the architecture and the networking design used in a particular software product. Although applications deployed at the edge aren't the most energy efficient, for example, they do save on data transmission costs, she noted.

Gartner also recommends decision-makers inquire about software providers' operational use of renewable energy and efforts to calculate and reduce its customers' GHG emissions associated with the use of its software.

Gartner expects organizations will fall into a phased pattern of engaging with high-tech partners on ESG.

The first phase, Moyer said, is about clarifying the customer's sustainability objectives. The second phase is for sharing material issues with high-tech providers and determining how well that vendor can help meet those sustainability ambitions. "It gets more serious after that," she said. In the third phase, stakeholders inquire about GHG emissions data, water footprint, and verified or audited environmental data from vendors.

This phased approach means that significant competitive advantages are up for grabs. "There'll be some vendors that you need to exit that relationship and others that you'll probably get closer with, depending on what kind of progress they're making and how you can learn from them and collaborate with them to make faster progress together," Moyer said.