Emma Dennard, VP Northern Europe at OVHcloud, explores why sustainability is becoming an important factor in cloud provider selection.

According to research from the Cloud Industry Forum, over a quarter (28%) of organisations consider sustainability credentials important when choosing a cloud provider. Clearly, factors like price (rated significant by 58%) and trust/security (47%) will almost always be more important, but sustainability is slowly but surely creeping up the corporate agenda.

With this in mind, cloud migration can be a bit of a balancing act. Organisations move to cloud to improve their agility, flexibility and gain cost-savings, but assuming that a workload has to go somewhere, cloud can be a greener option if it’s chosen carefully.

However, there are a number of pitfalls to bear in mind, alongside the benefits and advantages when viewing cloud migration through the lens of sustainability. And clearly, it’s a complex matter, so for the sake of clarity, we won’t be looking at other factors in the equation – such as price, security, interoperability, geographic reach, and not to mention all of the internal governance and training issues, or questions around technology roadmap and process.

Cloud comprehension

First and foremost, sustainability reporting can be an obscure science. Most technology providers offer two types of reporting: generalised reports about their own carbon footprint as an organisation, and specific reports about the carbon impact of the workload that organisations are running.

The transparency and clarity of these reports is all-important, and it’s important to keep an eye out for small print and references to appendices. In many cases this can simply be explanatory – sustainability and carbon isn’t an easy thing to measure – but in some cases, how a technology provider explains sustainability may clash with how an end-user organisation wants to report it.

For example, a number of cloud organisations use credits to match or offset their carbon emissions and may be unclear about how they then integrate this into core sustainability reports. Every organisation reports differently, but it’s important to know how this has been done. This then helps businesses to make their own decisions about whether the cloud provider’s approach fits with their sustainability reporting style in turn.

Core metrics

There are as many sustainability metrics as there are experts in the field, but there are a few core measures that are important to understand before embarking on any journey into cloud. Power Usage Effectiveness (PuE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WuE) have been used and debated for some time but are essentially the ratio of power or water used by the actual technology infrastructure, compared to the power or water used by peripheral systems (for example, lighting, air conditioning and so on). A PuE of 1.0 means that the same amount of power is being used by IT as by non-core systems – and is generally seen as a ‘good’ measure.

Of course, all systems of measurement have their limitations. If a data centre suddenly moves a large number of workloads to another country, its IT usage will drop, but its non-core IT usage may stay broadly similar (although you’d expect a drop in cooling requirements). This would make the PuE look worse, despite no real change to the efficiency of the infrastructure.

Alongside this is carbon reporting, running servers results in power usage and an associated carbon footprint – but it’s important to remember that data centres have physical and social supply chains that extend ‘behind’ them. A thorough cloud provider will provide an estimate of scope one, two and three emissions.

A Scope 1 emission results from activities that a company directly controls – for example, on-site generators. Scope 2 is from purchased energy. Scope 3 emissions are the toughest to measure, but are usually the lion’s share: they’re emissions from the supply chain, whether that’s from the manufacturing of equipment, transport and logistics, or even the running of office buildings around the world. There have been some examples from very prominent, household name organisations where Scope 3 emissions have represented 90% of their total emissions – so it’s well worth knowing the difference.

Finally, it’s worth having an understanding of the clean energy mix, especially if you’re putting data in another country. At the end of the day, unless a data centre directly provides its own energy, it’ll be taken from the grid. This power will usually be from a mix of renewable and non-renewable sources, and it can come as a bit of a surprise if you’re familiar with your own country’s mix, but moving data to a cloud in another. This intersects with the efficiency metrics we talked about earlier – for example, in one region, the cloud provider may be very efficient, but using non-renewable power sources, which isn’t as sustainable as a slightly less efficient power provider which only uses renewable sources.

Investing in green

Alongside the main foundational ways of measuring a cloud provider’s sustainability credentials, there are a number of other ‘signals’ to look at. These signals generally show if an organisation is going above and beyond what an end-user (i.e. non-technology provider) can do, and as such, are well worth looking at.

For example, many technology providers now recycle and re-use their components. When cloud servers reach end-of-life, not all of the components need to be recycled, and many organisations will strip them down and re-use parts in lower-spec and lower-cost ranges to both improve overall sustainability and avoid unnecessary purchases. A sustainable organisation is often a savvy organisation.

At the same time, there are many sustainability issues that established technology organisations can’t solve themselves – particularly in the sustainability arena. A dedicated organisation will invest in other companies that are untangling complex issues like direct carbon capture or recycling difficult components or packaging, for example.

Finally, it’s well worth remembering that these metrics represent just one small part of the overall cloud equation. Due diligence in this area will also examine social and corporate governance, which are also enormous topics in their own right and deserve standalone research.

A greener future

Cloud’s sustainability can often be compared to its security: providers have dedicated time and resources to invest into it, usually giving a higher standard of technology, process and infrastructure than an organisation could provide on its own. In the same way, providers are – quite rightly – under pressure to disclose and improve their sustainability credentials, and as such, are taking the matter very seriously indeed.

This can result in a better standard of sustainability than end-user organisations could provide on their own, and it’s encouraging to see that many firms are considering sustainability alongside factors including price and security. A key part of any sustainability strategy is that we should be able to answer the needs of today without compromising the world of tomorrow, and in many cases, cloud can be the answer to both parts of that equation.