Gartner predicts that by 2026, 50% of organizations will manage their hybrid cloud energy consumption through sustainability monitoring

According to Gartner, Inc. by 2026, fifty percent of organizations will have implemented 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 that are driving organizations to adopt carbon neutrality and net zero targets by 2030.

“Organizations have ambitious greenhouse gas 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 of the company Gartner.

According to Gartner, reporting on activities, energy consumption, water efficiency 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 service providers will evolve their product portfolio and provide new capabilities for tracking CO2 emissions 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.

Current adoption challenges

There are many challenges to 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.”

Gartner analysts said there are several monitoring/observability processes and tools specialized in tracking CO2 and power metrics at various levels of IT (hardware, middleware, applications, data center, cloud, etc.). However, this makes it difficult for I&O leaders to determine whether their environmental sustainability initiatives will be successful.

Current monitoring tools that incorporate some sustainability metrics focus primarily on local environments, making it difficult to achieve these goals in today’s hybrid IT environments.

The journey to net zero

To overcome these challenges, Gartner recommends that organizations adopt GreenOps or sustainability practices to begin building an operating model that will help achieve carbon neutrality goals. Sustainability telemetry also needs to be collected and managed from cloud service providers, in the same way that telemetry for health outcomes and consumption costs is managed.

“There may not be a need for such urgent action now, but treating these signals with equal importance allows organizations to benefit from real-time greenhouse gas optimization and energy optimization when the opportunity becomes available,” Byrne said.

Gartner recommends that I&O leaders examine and evaluate monitoring vendors against a new set of metrics related to energy consumption, energy efficiency and CO2 emissions for IT infrastructures and determine whether their capabilities are useful in hybrid IT environments.