There will soon come a time when when increased market demand for cloud services will tempt cloud leaders to turn to carbon-intensive cloud options powered by nonrenewable energy. But cloud decision-makers "need to keep to a net-zero standard," Deloitte's Chief Cloud Strategy Officer David Linthicum told SDxCentral.

If organizations are going to eventually reach net-zero carbon emissions to aid in limiting global temperature rise and avoiding the impacts of climate change, cloud leaders need to "solve demand problems through planning and innovation, not just rapidly building data centers that are powered by fossil fuels," Linthicum explained.

Compute and storage demand is expected to grow rapidly throughout 2023 and 2024, according to Deloitte Consulting. "Keeping this in mind, [cloud decision makers] need to plan and invest in this growth," he said.

Organizations beginning to migrate their workloads to the cloud often expect that effort to double as a sustainability initiative. But there are important nuances to consider to ensure an organization's carbon footprint is actually minimized by moving to the cloud.

"The big one is to create net-new systems with power consumption in mind, as well as make sure that migrated systems are also optimized to minimize power consumption," Linthicum explained. Code and data in DevOps tool chains should be tested to ensure everything's optimized to use the least amount of processing power, storage, and network usage.

But organizations also need to assess how their cloud provider(s) approach sustainability. This means looking at providers' sustainability or environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports, any published sustainability standards they may be following, and any audits that may have taken place.

"Enterprises need to understand that just because a cloud provider claims sustainability, that does not mean that they are. It’s up to the enterprises to verify their green creditability before they sign contracts," Linthicum said.

Most cloud providers, when compared to traditional enterprise data centers, are doing pretty well in terms of sustainability — mostly due to large investments in renewable energy, Linthicum said. Powering the cloud with renewable energy, like wind or solar, is the primary strategy hyperscalers use to lower their emissions.

Providers often prioritize strategies like data center placement and investments in cloud service provider engineering. They are also "leveraging data center-based resources, such as storage and compute, using multi-tenant approaches that are nearly fully optimized," he added. This means the supply chain of on-demand computing can offer a carbon footprint close to net zero that can be independently verified by an audit.

"These patterns of innovation need to continue considering the rapid growth of cloud computing and the fact that enterprises are now demanding cloud providers that can prove sustainability," Linthicum said.