IDC analysts touted the connection between consumption models and improving enterprise environmental sustainability efforts during a webinar about the research firm's global survey on the future of digital infrastructure.

"Sustainability has become the watchword for the last two years," Susan Middleton, IDC research VP of flexible consumption and financing strategies for IT infrastructure, said during the webinar. "We continue to see IT organizations looking for how can we not only reduce our emissions, [but] be able to enable our organization to really meet those sustainability landmarks that almost every Fortune 500 company has today."

A key component is for IT organizations to work with chief sustainability officers in leading the sustainability charge, Middleton explained. But beyond that, she suggested IT organizations consider how their operations can impact the sustainability of the enterprise more broadly.

"There's a real connection here between how consumption models can help sustainability," she said, citing an IDC survey that found 83% of respondents agree sustainability is the most important criteria in IT buying decisions, "and that's significant. So the sustainability topic has become a must do."

Roadmaps to lower overall environmental impact are "really being implemented," Middleton said, and there's significant focus on selecting vendors to work with that ensure corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates will be met, she added.

In the like-minded vendor selection process, IT organizations are looking for vendors that have sustainability initiatives built into their own operations, and they want to truly understand that vendor's sustainability journey to see what others have been through and if they're really on the same path.

The most common business drivers for sustainability are improving operational efficiency and costs, "but it's also very directly tied to brand reputation" internally and externally, Middleton explained.

"A lot of organizations now want to talk about what their roadmap is, and their efficiencies, and what they're focused on – because they need to attract their employees, and they want to keep them and retain them because they're doing good," she said.

Middleton recommends an environmental reporting structure be built into as-a-service IT models.

"We already see that there's metrics in the dashboard about power usage, which is important, but the next step is going to be meeting regulatory compliance and financial regulations to show exactly your breakdown of what [resources] you're using for your equipment," she said, adding that she's seen some vendors working on that because it's becoming a priority for customers, and she expects it to be more common in the next 12 to 18 months.

IT organizations can also impact an enterprise's broader sustainability through as-a-service models that remove the common IT pain point of end-of-life asset decommissioning. With an as-a-service IT model, "you're no longer responsible for what happens to that equipment at end of life," Middleton explained.

That's a huge benefit because it reduces headaches for IT staff, and "now you're working with someone that's going to make sure they meet the regulatory compliance for how they handle that asset decommissioning," she said.

This also helps from a budget perspective because not needing to own the IT equipment or take care of it when it's at end of life saves money that can be used to offset new equipment costs.

"You can use those trade-ins to help you fund those initiatives, which really helps reduce a lot of the complexity ... with legacy infrastructure and technical debt. A lot of that gets resolved here because it's a cycle to continue your investment strategy, and then end-of-life equipment can often be refurbished or recycled, which meets those environmental targets we talked about," Middleton explained.