Sustainability is a priority for 90% of IT decision makers, according to a recent IDG survey commissioned by Google Cloud.

IDG surveyed more than 2,000 IT leaders from around the world and found 75% believed sustainability is a “must-have” or “major consideration” when choosing cloud providers.

The importance of environmental sustainability has skyrocketed as the climate crisis becomes an everyday reality. IDG reports 66% of the respondents’ organizations have committed to sustainability targets, and another 29% plan to implement targets, reflecting organizations’ increasing desire to take action.

Sustain.Life is a software-as-a-service application that aims to help organizations take their first step toward a more sustainable future.

“We really wanted to do something that was more accessible, where we could try to reach out to not just the really big corporations of the world, but try to accelerate change across a really wide number of businesses,” Sustain.Life CEO Annalee Bloomfield said.

Many businesses are new to sustainability and Sustain.Life aims to help organizations in all industries navigate the associated challenges.

The process begins with benchmarking and creating a roadmap. Sustain.Life’s model is to balance “big strategic change with smaller, momentum-building team engagement-type activities,” Bloomfield said.

Sustain.Life has a suite of more than 100 action plans created by sustainability experts with language geared toward novices. Each action includes key performance indicators and data tracking capabilities, like carbon calculators.

The company plans to include more options for organizations to purchase carbon offsets. However, Sustain.Life’s “focus is really on operational change. We're more focused on reduction and mitigation capabilities rather than offsets,” she added, reflecting the platform’s focus on environmental stewardship and sustainability instead of environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

One-third of the individuals the platform works with are green-team members, individuals who have volunteered to work on sustainability initiatives. Senior leadership and sustainability professionals make up the other two-thirds of the platform’s contacts.

At the green-team stage, sustainability efforts are “sort of exploratory. It's not really strategic, but there's a lot of energy,” Bloomfield said. The platform seeks to accelerate those green-team efforts, increase corporate interest, and implement measurable action.

In this way, Sustain.Life meets the needs of small to medium-sized businesses that don’t know how to begin or don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated sustainability team or consultancy group, she explained.

Regardless of where businesses are on their path to environmental sustainability, Sustain.Life aims to create action bolstered by individuals’ passion for sustainability, Bloomfield said. “Across the board, everybody we work with really cares about sustainability in their personal lives.”