This is according to Gartner, and reflects increasing pressure from investors, customers, regulators, and governments to meet carbon neutrality and net zero goals by the end of the decade.

“Organisations have strong carbon reduction goals to achieve 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, VP analyst at Gartner.

The survey, which included 2,457 respondents from 84 countries, noted that this emphasis on cloud investment underscores the growing responsibility of I&O leaders to ensure environmental sustainability in their operations.

Gartner highlights that reporting on activities, energy usage, water efficiency, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in cloud and data centres will introduce new IT management areas, resulting in the adoption of new IT operating models, termed GreenOps. 

“I&O leaders and managed service providers will demand monitoring, analytical and generative AI services from software and cloud vendors to manage and optimise CO2e emissions and power consumption for reporting and IT management purposes,” Byrne added.

Monitoring vendors are expected to evolve their product portfolios to enable tracking of CO2e and power consumption across various IT layers—data centre, hardware, middleware, and applications. This evolution will provide the necessary analytical capabilities and insights to optimise workloads across the board.

However, there are significant challenges to adopting sustainability-enabled monitoring. Many organisations currently use historical data with minimal real-time information, impacting timely business decisions. 

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“Most relevant metrics aligned to net zero carbon are based on CO2e emissions and power consumption,” continued Byrne. “However, IT organisations don’t currently have the capability to gather this information directly. Some request it from their IT providers, but the quality and granularity of information at the data centre and cloud account level aren’t accurate enough to rely on for good management decisions.”

To navigate these challenges, Gartner recommends organisations adopt GreenOps or sustainability practices to build operating models that support carbon-neutral objectives. This includes collecting and managing sustainability telemetry from cloud providers, akin to how performance and cost telemetry are managed. 

“This may not need to be acted on as urgently now, but treating those signals with equal importance positions organisations to benefit from real-time GHG emissions and power consumption optimization when the capability becomes available,” said Byrne.