Evaluating Carbon Emissions Savings from Cloud Computing

This IDC Market Perspective evaluates the carbon emissions savings from cloud computing. Increasingly, customers have begun paying attention to environmental footprint when considering purchasing products and services from a company. Many enterprises have also raised their investment efforts in sustainability programs. According to IDC's 2Q23 Cloud Pulse Survey, cloud buyers indicated an increasing focus on sustainability by having more targets for net-zero goals. As the number of enterprises and individuals relying on digital services continues to increase, the demand for cloud computing resources will continue to grow rapidly.The forecast represented in this document is based on IDC's Datacenter Trends: Sustainable Datacenter Builds and CO2 Emission program model. "More and more enterprises around the globe consider sustainability not as a 'nice to have' but a 'must have' for their IT and business operations," says Olga Yashkova, research manager, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies at IDC. "Due to the economies of scale, access to renewable energy, and investments in innovative technologies, cloud service providers are in a unique position not only to offer sustainable services to their customers but also to help their customers move closer to their own sustainability goals."