Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors have gained significant traction recently. Giving yourself a ranking to prove your worth as a good citizen of the planet seems like a great idea.
These tools are worth looking at, but the reality is they may be reporting a false positive. They don’t look at the total inefficiencies of the overall cloud architecture, only at specific tactical metrics that could prove meaningless. Indeed, it provides good scores for enterprises underperforming in sustainability and using public cloud providers.
The desire for good ESG cred
The increasing pressure on cloud providers to enhance their ESG performance is a testament to the growing awareness of the environmental impact of data center growth. I live in northern Virginia, where data centers are scattered everywhere.