Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) all made moves this year to tackle their environmental impacts — including passing the emissions-reduction baton to their cloud customers.

The big three cloud giants each released similar tools that measure a company's carbon footprint associated with its cloud usage. Here's a look at each offering.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings that connect to data sources in real time, increase the speed of data reporting, accurately count carbon, and utilize intelligent insights to help its customers take effective environmental action.

“For organizations who adopt this infrastructure, it will allow them to track and report emissions across the value chain, and then use these same insights to find the most impactful and efficient environmental impact reduction strategies,” Microsoft Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa said during Microsoft Inspire.

The tool allows Azure customers to view data on their emissions that result from the cloud, devices, and applications in a comprehensive emissions report. Companies can also break down emissions data by source. For example, if an issue arises with a heating and ventilation system that hinders a company's progress toward an environmental target, the company can report the problem to the appropriate source using Microsoft’s cloud tool to resolve the issue.

“With Cloud for Sustainability we are bringing together capabilities across our cloud and creating an entirely new business process category to help every organization address this very urgent need,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during his keynote at Inspire.

Carbon Footprint is Google's tool that allows Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers to measure, track, and report gross carbon emissions associated with their cloud usage. The provider also alerts customers of the carbon footprint associated with idle cloud instances. Customers can then choose to delete those instances and lower their carbon footprint.

Similarly, Google’s Active Assist Recommender service includes a sustainability impact category where the Unattended Project Recommender API resides. This API uses machine learning to identify projects that are most likely abandoned based on usage of cloud services, networking and API activity, and billing. Deleting those abandoned projects mitigates a company’s overall carbon footprint, reduces costs, and manages security risks.

Google published the Carbon Footprint carbon emissions calculation methodology providing further transparency for auditors and reporting teams.

AWS, typically the top player in other sections of the cloud space, was the last of the three to announce its carbon footprint tracking tool. version — the

The company's AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool was announced at its re:Invent show earlier this month. It provides customers with carbon footprint data resulting from their use of AWS services, along with a forecast of how AWS' in-house sustainability initiatives will lower the carbon intensity of customers' AWS workloads. The provider plans to make this tool available in early 2022.

Although these emissions measurement tools tend to posit cloud providers as altruistically helping customers reduce emissions, it's more of a win-win for all parties.

When customers are able to understand, analyze, and take action to lower their emissions, the providers benefit via their own scope three emissions — which include emissions resulting from customers' use of products, like cloud services.