Adoption of a cloud-first technology is becoming an acceptable strategy or norm for many organisations. As more organisations in Asia launch sustainability initiatives, Do leaders at organisations with ESG goals understand the linkages between sustainability goals and their IT infrastructure strategy, including the cloud?
Deloitte’s chief cloud strategy officer, David Linthicum, predicts that in 2023, organisations will care more about measuring cloud sustainability than they have historically.
The Deloitte Study, 2022 US Future of Cloud Survey report, says there’s a 14.5 percentage point gap between organisations’ stated cloud priorities and how well they say they are achieving them.
Wasabi Technologies, Singapore general manager Sunny Chua, opined that with increasingly digital operations, enterprise storage needs have grown exponentially in recent years as innovation, business transformation, and data compliance regulations drive momentum for cloud uptake.
How are sustainability considerations impacting cloud strategies and businesses’ overall digital transformation ambitions?
Sunny Chua: Simultaneously, businesses here are paying more attention to the overall carbon impact of digitalisation. After all, data centres have a considerable impact on the environment – contributing up to 5% of global carbon output.
Businesses are therefore growingly opting for the efficiency of public cloud solutions especially when it comes to storage. Indeed, research points to the public cloud enabling the business sustainability charge, with more energy-efficient infrastructure alongside greater workload flexibility, and better server utilisation rates.
Naturally then, businesses’ sustainability considerations are translating directly to IT spending in selecting cloud providers. Where price, performance, and scalability were once the only considerations for businesses looking to leverage the cloud to meet their digital needs, sustainability is a top factor.
What are enterprises looking for with cloud solutions in the age of sustainability-forward businesses?
Sunny Chua: While sustainability is a top priority today, business agility and cost-effectiveness can’t take a backseat either. Businesses must be able to grow operations internationally without dealing a hefty cost on the green line. This may seem simple enough, but the reality is that businesses must achieve this amidst a confluence of other factors that can make sustainable IT infrastructure a challenge.
For instance, businesses must also balance data protection amidst the quickly evolving state of cyber threats in the Asia-Pacific and growing regulatory scrutiny over data use. Resulting in stringent data sovereignty regulations therefore now necessitate local storage more than ever before.
Cloud solutions would therefore have to be both highly energy-efficient and trackable so businesses can measure their overall carbon across multiple local regions. In addition, cloud solutions that can simultaneously offer data protection, such as with object lock and data immutability, will certainly provide an added incentive.
How have challenges and opportunities for cloud providers then changed? 
Sunny Chua: The convergence of these market drivers has therefore created an inflexion point in the cloud market. It is then cloud providers that can strike a careful balance and meet businesses’ concerns on these various fronts that will emerge on top.
Thankfully, there are equal opportunities and challenges here. With increasing energy costs globally, there is a business case for greener and more energy-efficient cloud infrastructure – especially as storage needs grow with data localisation, simply building more data centres will not be a sustainable course forward.
Undeniably then, baking sustainability into the design of services to ensure optimal power consumption and data centre efficiency will be a requisite step. Alternatives that skirt around embedding sustainability into the core of cloud infrastructure will eventually lead to escalating energy costs that will translate to increased costs for the provider, and therefore customers.
What are the ways cloud providers are addressing businesses’ sustainability considerations – and are these enough?
Sunny Chua: Embedding sustainability has included upgrading operations and hardware with strategic investments, such as those mentioned earlier – in newer, highly-efficient chips, network infrastructure, as well as technology like cooling systems.
Making investments to prolong the full lifecycle of a product, as well as relying on data-driven tools to guide energy and service management processes on a broader scale, are some other ways.
However, from a service provider’s perspective, ensuring the energy efficiency of cloud offerings alone is not enough. It is equally crucial to also establish a reliable measurement of carbon footprint for businesses - cloud carbon calculators, for instance, can anticipate the environmental impact of cloud operations over time.
Ultimately, ensuring and managing IT sustainability is a long-term and iterative process that requires equal responsibility from all players in the ecosystem - not just cloud providers, but businesses as well.
Without empowering this wider ecosystem with the tools to minimise their carbon output, the investments made by cloud providers in delivering energy-efficient cloud solutions run the risk of going unrealised.
