IBM views IT technology not only as a source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but as a tool to address the company's environmental impact and sustainability, IBM CIO Kathryn Guarini told SDxCentral.

"We think about leveraging technology for insights, for driving the progress that we need to reduce our carbon footprint, and [for shifting] to a very intentional approach to achieving the goals that we've collectively set at a company level and a societal level," Guarini said. "There's a really important role that we play as leaders in business — and in IT, in particular."

Guarini explained IBM approaches IT sustainability from three angles: "how we adopt hybrid cloud and sustainable computing," reducing electronic waste and energy consumption, and using technology to provide data insights and optimization that put "all aspects of our company ... in a position to understand and to take action to improve sustainability," she said.

The environmental impacts of compute primarily stem from fossil fuel-based energy consumption, which is "not negligible" on a global scale. Although artificial intelligence (AI) workloads require a significant amount of energy compared to traditional compute, AI can be useful in optimizing power utilization in data centers, which "allows us to improve from where we are today," Guarini noted.

However, "we have to make sure that we're not creating a bigger problem as we look at all these new applications of AI," she argued.

One way CIOs can mitigate the energy footprint of AI is by prioritizing the use of renewable energy when possible. Guarini stressed how important it is for CIOs to be "thoughtful about the sourcing of the energy and [lean] more toward renewables," she said, adding that CIOs "do have an opportunity to influence that because we are buying power."

CIOs are the executives tasked with deciding in which physical locations large enterprises deploy their workloads, and "that's the opportunity we have as leaders to be carbon-aware," Guarini said. By choosing a more sustainable public cloud or private data center, "we can influence with that purchasing power ... because of the size and scale of the workloads we're deploying in those environments," she said.

This is where IBM's approach to the hybrid cloud model comes in. Guarini noted the nature of hybrid cloud flexibility provides "the ability to move workloads more seamlessly across different environments."

Hybrid cloud is particularly useful, for example, when optimizing workload location based on the amount of renewable energy available on regional power grids, and that freedom is something IBM "didn't have before," she added. "Where we deploy our workload matters a lot."

From a global perspective, modern sustainability-related challenges exist atop decades worth of compounded issues that ought to have been addressed long ago. "The reality is we have some real work to do collectively — society at large, not any one function or organization in particular — to optimize for a sustainability position," Guarini said. "There are real levers at our disposal. There are solutions, technologies that help us to move the needle and take action that will progress us in the right direction," she said.