Nearly every cloud provider is touting its sustainability efforts as the data center industry continues to grow and burden the environment in tandem. However, much of this sustainability-focused messaging is lofty, aspirational, and holds little practical value apart from positioning those vendors as bleeding hearts for the planet, according to Gartner analyst Ed Anderson.

Corporate sustainability remains a relatively new phenomenon, and as a result, much of this effort constitutes setting environmental targets often decades into the future.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that — any genuine effort to be more sustainable and lower carbon emissions is a step in the right direction.

Nonetheless, cloud providers need to offer more evidence of their progress against those targets, and "not evidence of redirecting those sustainability problems somewhere else, but fundamentally tackling these sustainability issues and making real demonstrable progress against those aspirations," Anderson said.

This lack of transparency is critical because there aren't any standardized sustainability reporting systems like what exist for the financial sector, for example. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is the closest there is to corporate sustainability regulation, "but even that is very loosely defined," Anderson said.

Within the realm of ESG, frameworks differ from standards, though the two are complementary. Frameworks provide broader guidance on how information is prepared, how it’s structured, and what topics are included in reporting. ESG standards make frameworks actionable by providing more detailed requirements and metrics within each topic.

Various ESG frameworks and accompanying standards are established by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the Carbon Disclosure Project, and the Global Reporting Initiative, among others. However, it’s challenging to compare companies' progress because each organization uses an assortment of different frameworks and standards.

Without a consistent way for cloud providers to report against multiple dimensions of sustainability, and without some type of mandate that would require sustainability reporting in the first place, each company chooses how much and which information to share.

Cloud providers, as a consequence, "tend to overreport the areas where they think they're doing good work, and either underreport or ignore entirely areas where they may not be doing so well," Anderson explained.

Energy utilization and the carbon footprint of specific cloud services lacks insight into concrete data, and the immaturity of sustainability metrics and workload placement tools are to blame, according to Anderson.

It's important for providers to clearly present this data in the interest of transparency and accountability, but also so cloud customers can make the most sustainable choices for their compute needs.

"It's difficult for a customer to look at [sustainability-focused] messaging and to really be able to net out a clear picture of where those providers are, practically speaking. And that's why I say there needs to be so much more transparency into these activities to help customers get the data they need," Anderson said.

Gartner expects an influx of tools to help organizations measure and reduce the carbon emissions of their cloud usage, similar to existing tools that help organizations optimize cloud spending.

Indeed, the carbon emissions of hyperscale cloud services will become one of the top three factors in cloud purchase decisions by 2025, according to Gartner. "In that sense, it's like the shared responsibility model," Anderson said.

Cloud providers are responsible for operating sustainably and reporting on the environmental impacts of cloud services. On the flip side, customers have a responsibility to consume cloud services in a sustainable way by studying and understanding the carbon impacts of their cloud usage and using that knowledge to optimize their use of the cloud, he explained.