Investors, regulators, consumers, and even the employees of an increasing number of companies are putting pressure on enterprises to fight climate change with their choice of cloud providers, according to an article published Tuesday in Forbes.
The push to use ‘green cloud’ providers and practices is likely to be the next big battle in the cloud industry, writes Udi Nachmany, a contributor to the magazine.
Research by Anne Currie, Container Solutions’ tech ethicist, and Paul Johnston, a tech industry veteran, consultant and researcher, was cited by Nachmany. Their 2018 paper, updated this year, assigns grades to the major cloud providers.
In their rankings, only Google and Microsoft’s services earned A minus grades. Amazon Web Services was assigned a C minus.
The criteria by which investors are seeking to judge companies is shifting, Nachmany writes. Companies are beginning to align with their demands.
‘As a cloud buyer looking for a strategic partner, carbon intensity and corporate climate governance are set to become dominant factors, more so than the short-term financial performance metrics we track today’, he writes.
The reasons for this, he claims, are twofold: ‘First, companies who care about their broader eco-systems, tend to financially outperform those who don’t. Second, investors are risk-focused, and climate change poses an increasingly complex risk. Companies that don’t manage these risks—plan for them, discuss them at board level, carry out scenario planning, set targets—might be setting themselves up for long-term failure’.
Companies are also feeling pressure from their own employees, he writes. ‘DevOps culture and developer empowerment, coupled with the increasing share of late-Millenials and Gen-Z in the workforce, are accelerating the pressure for ethical behavior from internal stakeholders’.
You can read more from Container Solutions on environmental impact and cloud providers here.
Photo by Thomas Richter on Unsplash
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