IT leaders have grown an environmental conscience, and a big one at that, according to new research.
Previously, vendor selection and operational activities primarily focused on cost and compute; however, the zeitgeist has shifted to include a third important dimension: conscience (expressed as sustainability), the latest industry research from CloudBolt Software shows.
The research, based on responses from over 250 global technology leaders, points to green conscience now driving IT decision-makers and practitioners to be much more purposeful in the cloud and infrastructure choices they make.
The majority of IT leaders (68%) say sustainability is a top-down mandate, formulated by either the executive team or board of directions. As a result, 79% of them say they are on the hook for helping their companies achieve specific sustainability goals.
Key ways of getting there include:
Green is driving a rethinking of cloud provider choices 68% say they take a cloud vendors sustainability initiatives into consideration when deciding whether to do business with that vendor. Those doing the most to address sustainability and green initiatives? Survey says AWS (41%), Azure (31%), and GCP (9%).
IT teams willing to pay more green for green 79% said they would pay a premium to vendors incorporating sustainability into their business model. Specifically, 27% would pay 6-10% more, and a whopping 35% said they would pay 11-15% more.
A growing green conscience is influencing IT and cloud ops 78% of respondents agree that the day-to-day activities they undertake and the public / private cloud choices they make can materially affect the environment for better or worse.
When it comes to day-to-day operations, cloud management platforms (CMPs) such as CloudBolts help enterprises meet and exceed their sustainability goals by significantly reducing the amount of energy required to conduct many business processes.
Shadow IT reduction
According to Gartner, nearly 40% of IT spending goes to shadow IT. Without proper guardrails and role-based access controls in place, workloads can spiral out of control and increase an organisation's carbon footprint. With CloudBolt, ITOps can finally set cost, compliance, and security guardrails for workload deployment, while giving developers the easy button for anything-as-a-service.
Continuous cloud cost optimisation According to the 2021 State of FinOps report, the #1 pain for FinOps teams is getting engineers to take action. As the only vendor employing automation for cost control, CloudBolt continuously notifies FinOps of real-time cost issues and optimises across AWS, Azure, GCP, and VMware environments. The result? Faster, greener outcomes without the need for spreadsheets, analysing gigabytes of Excel data, and chasing down developers to shut down workloads.
DevOps enablement and CI/CD optimisation According to another recent CloudBolt Industry Insights report, only 11% of enterprises consider their continuous infrastructure / continuous deployment (CI/CD) reliable. Unreliable infrastructure leads to failed CI/CD pipelines and process restarts. The result? Wasted energy and higher carbon footprints. With continuous infrastructure testing from CloudBolt, ITOps and DevOps can finally detect infrastructure issues before failures occur, thereby optimising resources and usage across CI/CD and minimising energy waste.
"We were pleasantly surprised to receive such an overwhelming response to our sustainability research initiative," says Bernard Sanders, cofounder and CTO of CloudBolt.
"The results show that technology leaders care about the long-term impact their enterprise operations have on the environment.
"At CloudBolt, we provide products that ensure our customers are only using and paying for the cloud resources they need, eliminating unnecessary power usage," he says.
"This helps our customers reduce their organisations' environmental impact while enabling them anywhere on their hybrid cloud journey."
