Reducing your carbon footprint: How big tech is driving the GreenOps revolution

According to Gartner, by 2026, 50% of organizations will implement sustainability monitoring to manage energy consumption and carbon footprint metrics in hybrid cloud environments.

This is a response to pressure from investors, customers, regulators and governments for organizations to adopt carbon neutrality and net zero targets by 2030.

For example, the Australian Government recently introduced legislation establishing the Net Zero Economy Authority to support the country’s net zero transition.

“Organizations have ambitious carbon reduction goals and expect their infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to launch sustainability initiatives that align their current IT carbon footprint with corporate goals,” said Padraig Byrne, vice president analyst at Gartner and conference chair of the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, held in Sydney in May 2024.

The Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey 2024 found that 79% of Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) CIOs expect to commit the second-largest amount of new or additional funding to cloud platforms in 2024, making it increasingly that cloud environmental sustainability is becoming a top responsibility for I&O leaders.

The study collected data from 2,457 respondents from 84 countries, including 87 from ANZ.

According to Gartner, reporting activities, energy consumption, water savings and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the cloud and data centers will become new areas of IT management, resulting in new IT operating models (GreenOps) that will require new processes, capabilities and tools .

“I&O leaders and managed service providers will require monitoring, analytics and AI generation services from software and cloud providers to manage and optimize CO2e emissions and energy consumption for IT reporting and governance,” Byrne said.

To meet this demand, monitoring vendors will expand their product portfolio. They will provide new opportunities to track CO2e and energy consumption across IT layers – data center, hardware, middleware and applications.

According to Gartner, this will provide analytical capabilities and insights to optimize any type of workload. However, there are several challenges in adopting sustainability-sensitive monitoring.

Organizations that currently manage sustainability metrics use historical data and little or no real-time information, which may impact some real-time business decisions.

“The most relevant metrics associated with net zero carbon emissions are based on CO2e emissions and energy use,” Byrne said.

“However, IT organizations currently do not have the ability to directly collect this information. Some require this from their IT vendors, but the quality and detail of information at the data center and cloud account level is not accurate enough to be relied upon to make good management decisions.”

Image source: iStockphoto/Aurelie and Morgan David de Lossy