Is channel missing a trick by ignoring sustainability 'in' the cloud?

Efforts to measure carbon footprint of cloud services branded a 'chaotic mess'

End users are largely ignoring sustainability "in" - as opposed to "of" - the cloud.

That's according to former Proact UK commercial director Mark Butcher, who now runs cloud and digital services optimisation consultancy Posetiv Cloud.

Talking to CRN, Butcher branded current efforts by vendors and channel partners to measure cloud sustainability a "complete, chaotic mess".

Posetiv Cloud typically helps its large enterprise and midmarket customers cut their cloud and digital carbon footprint by 30-35 per cent, he claimed.

"We talk about the difference between sustainability ‘of' platforms and services and sustainability ‘in' those platforms and services. The cloud providers have got the ‘of' bit pretty much under control," he said.

"But sustainability ‘in' the cloud - or in platforms or the datacentre - is entirely different, because it's the responsibility of the user. And that's what's being mostly ignored.

"The average waste in servers on-premise is about 30-40 per cent - so everything oversized, not switched off, built badly. And if you've ever done anything in FinOps you'll know that the average waste in cloud services is around 45 per cent."

'A chaotic mess'

According to Butcher, current efforts to measure the carbon footprint of cloud services by the hyperscalers and channel partners have focused too much on power-based scope 1 and 2 emissions. Scope 3 emissions - such as those embedded in the manufacturing processes of the servers, storage and networking hardware that sits in the datacentres - may generate between 80 and 90 per cent of the total, he said.

"If you're only looking at scope 1 and 2, you're ignoring almost the entirety of the problem. And there's been no consistent approach to measuring, tracking and remediating them. They're all trying to invent their own standards, so it's a complete chaotic mess right now," he said.

Some channel partners that have launched carbon calculators in recent months are "approaching it in a relatively basic way", according to Butcher.

"If you threw a rock out the window, it would hit a channel partner that's talking about sustainability, but most of them are talking about it from the context of not understanding the complexity around scope 1, 2 and 3. It's taking the feeds from [a hyperscaler's] calculator and visualising it, but that's only five per cent of the problem," he said.

Butcher said he is currently leading a working group for the global FinOps community to create an integrated approach to standardise the calculation of digital carbon footprint for cloud, datacentres and platforms.

"That's also what we [Posetiv Cloud] do. We deliver a service, that helps people calculate accurately their scope 1 and 2 emissions and estimate their scope 3 emissions. It then gives them a method of measuring and tracking that going forward and then a programme to help them get rid of the waste," he said.

Posetiv Cloud's clients are largely global companies with hundreds of datacentres and annual cloud spend in the hundreds of millions.

"They're being forced by their investors, their boards, their customers and their employees to take sustainability seriously," he said.

"The pressure is coming down from the top, and we're suddenly seeing people wanting to actually fix the problem rather than just greenwash it."