Cloud strategies must support ESG ambitions
Published by Colt Technology Services on January 11, 2023
Migration can reduce your carbon footprint if backed by a supportive partner
Following Colt’s annual cloud report for 2022, we wanted to analyse the environmental dimension of people’s cloud plans. Organisations seem largely to have embraced the cloud as a key support for their environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) strategy and now need the right partner to support it.
ESG issues are now a primary concern within enterprises of all types. The market for sustainable IT is set to be worth $36.6bn by 2025, triple the value of just two years ago, according to research collected by ReportLinker. This figure is corroborated by Colt’s annual cloud report for 2022, which looked into the cloud adoption attitudes and objectives of 500 senior IT and C-suite decision-makers. Some 74% of the IT leaders Colt questioned cited sustainability as an essential consideration for their cloud operations, including 27% who said it was significantly important.
The good news is that cloud migration is, at its heart, an environmentally beneficial move, compared to traditional alternatives. It says goodbye to on-site servers, off-site recovery systems and power consumption. And because cloud resources scale up and down according to need, they don’t burn needless energy.
Italian enterprises put the environment higher up the pecking order of cloud migration objectives, with 88% of respondents placing it high on their list of priorities. French and Spanish counterparts followed them at 81% each. The UK came in lowest at only 53%.
Looking at each vertical sector in more detail, the IT industry rates sustainability as a higher priority for cloud project aims, with 81% voting for it. Retail (80%) and Financial Services (79%) were close runners-up. The Healthcare sector, at 60%, clearly has competing priorities.
There is a clear generational divide. Among 18- to 24-year-old respondents, 100% were square behind sustainability as a cloud consideration compared to those over 55, who gave it the lowest rating of 68%. Interestingly, 25- to 34-year-olds were just ahead of the older contingent at 69%. The middle bracket from 35 to 54 voted it 75% important.
An organisation’s approach to ESG commitments is a board-level issue. All the more important is to choose suppliers whose values match your ESG ambitions and goals. EcoVadis, the world’s leading sustainability ratings provider, guides businesses towards effective carbon reduction strategies and recently awarded Colt a platinum rating for our commitment to making direct change. You can read more about our sustainability targets in our 2021 Sustainability Report.
You can also read our Cloud Research Report 2022 in full and discover what industry decision-makers had to say about the future of cloud migration.
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