O Gartner, a global leader in research and advice for businesses, predicts that 50% companies will adopt sustainability-enabled monitoring by 2026 to manage the energy consumption and carbon footprint metrics of their Hybrid Cloud environments.
Gartner analysts predict this is a response to pressure from investors, customers, regulators and governments, which is forcing companies to adopt carbon neutrality and zero emissions targets by 2030.
“Companies have strong carbon reduction targets to achieve and expect their infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to launch carbon reduction initiatives. sustainability aligned with your IT carbon footprint and corporate objectives,” says Padraig Byrne, Vice President and Analyst at Gartner.
According to Gartner, activity reports, energy use, water efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Cloud environments and data centers will become new areas of IT management, resulting in modern IT operating models (GreenOps ) that will require updated tools, capabilities and processes.
“Infrastructure and operations leaders will demand monitoring, analysis and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenIA) to manage and optimize CO2e emissions and energy consumption for reporting and IT management purposes,” says Byrne.
To satisfy this demand, monitoring system providers will evolve their product portfolios and enable new capabilities to track CO2e and energy consumption across different IT layers – data center, hardware, middleware and applications. According to Gartner, this will provide analytical capabilities and insights to optimize all types of workload.
Current Adoption Challenges:
There are several adoption challenges for sustainability-enabled monitoring. Companies that currently manage sustainability metrics use historical data and little or no real-time information, which can impact some immediate business decisions.
“Most relevant metrics aligned to sustainability are based on CO2e emissions and energy consumption,” says Byrne. “However, IT companies currently do not have the ability to gather this information directly. Some request this from their IT vendors, but the quality and granularity of information at the data center and A cloud are not accurate enough to be relied upon for good management decisions.”
Gartner analysts warn that there are few monitoring and observability processes and tools specialized in tracking CO2e and energy metrics at different IT levels (hardware, middleware, application, Data Center, Cloud, etc.). However, this makes it difficult for infrastructure and operations leaders to determine whether their environmental sustainability initiatives will be successful.
Current monitoring tools that address some of the sustainability metrics are primarily focused on environments on-premises, which makes addressing these objectives challenging in today's hybrid IT environments.
Journey to Zero Emissions:
To overcome these challenges, Gartner recommends that companies adopt GreenOps or sustainability practices to begin building the operating model that will help achieve carbon neutral goals. Sustainability telemetry should also be collected and managed from your Cloud providers, just as healthcare performance and consumer cost telemetry is managed.
“This may not need to be acted upon urgently now, but treating these signals with equal importance positions companies to benefit from real-time optimization of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption when capacity becomes available,” says Byrne .
Gartner recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders explore and evaluate monitoring vendors on a new set of metrics related to power consumption, energy efficiency and CO2e emissions for IT infrastructures and see if their capabilities are valid for hybrid IT environments .
Gartner clients can read more in the report “Predicts 2024 — Multicloud and Sustainability Drive Modernization“".
