Greener Clouds: How IT is Putting Sustainability Front and Center

Sustainability. 

It’s a word you’ve no doubt seen and heard a lot, in the news, in the entertainment media, and probably increasingly, in your IT leadership role. But the level to which sustainability and green initiatives have made their mark in the IT world was unclear, until now. 

In 2021 we launched CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII), a clearinghouse for the most current, up-to-date information about where things stand in IT, hybrid cloud and digital transformation initiatives. We see a New Cloud Order converging where myopic, siloed approaches no longer cut it, and thoughts of where things are going is of tantamount importance. 

After exploring hybrid cloud, CI/CD and IaC, we decided to follow a different path for our third CII report. We wanted to learn: is sustainability just a buzzword in the IT world, or is it becoming a way of life? 

The results of our latest survey, The Truth About IT Sustainability: Paying More Green to Get More Green, which included over 250 responses from IT leaders in June/July 2021 across the world utilizing Pulse Research’s proprietary platform, showed without a glimmer of a doubt that sustainability is here to stay, impacts buying decisions and has the attention of C-suite and board-level decision makers. 

Are Greener Clouds the Future of Sustainability? 

Here’s a high-level view of our latest CII report findings:  

• 76% of IT leader respondents believe climate change is an existential threat to our world. 
• 79% of respondents indicate their IT departments are expected to help their companies achieve specific sustainability initiatives driven by the Board of Directors of the C-Suite. 
• 67% say they take a cloud vendor’s sustainability initiatives into consideration when deciding whether to do business with that vendor. 
• 8 in 10 indicate they’ll pay a premium to work with vendors who are pursuing and incorporating sustainability into their business model, with 45% saying that premium could be as much as 11-15% or more. 

What Sustainability Means to Us  

Conscience drives IT leaders and practitioners to be much more purposeful in the infrastructure choices they make, aiming to ensure a greener future for all. This stems from a firm belief that cloud infrastructure choices have a material impact on the environment. 

We at CloudBolt are striving to do our part – making our contribution by helping enterprises eliminate wasteful resource use and create the optimal infrastructure resource allocation addressing equally the needs of developers, operations, and security teams.  

In the process, companies can reduce private cloud server sprawl and public cloud vendors are able to right-size capacity to affect computing and cooling costs. 

But there is more to be done, and we would love to hear more about what your company is doing to help build a more sustainable world. Find us on Twitter and LinkedIn and let us know what you’re doing with the hashtag #greenerclouds.

Why sustainability has become more than a buzzword in IT. Learn more in CloudBolt Industry Insights.