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New Pure Storage Survey Details the Critical Impact of IT on Global Environmental Sustainability Initiatives
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December 14, 2022 News

 

Pure Storage®, the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technology and services, in partnership with Wakefield Research, has released a new report identifying the critical impact of IT on environmental sustainability and the challenges present in addressing the urgent and growing demands for IT to be accountable drivers of change.

The new report, “Drivers of Change: Pure Storage IT Sustainability Impact Survey 2022,” examines the opportunities for IT professionals to collaborate with enterprise sustainability directors to navigate reductions in the environmental footprint of their organisations.

Survey Highlights

The “Drivers of Change” survey, fielded among 1,000 sustainability programme directors, saw consistent results across global markets, including the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. Report highlights include:

  • Half of Sustainability Managers Are Behind on Sustainability Goals. Most sustainability managers—78%—say their company’s leadership is treating sustainability initiatives as a priority, with the majority planning to meet sustainability goals within three to seven years (56%). However, only about half (51%) of those surveyed say they are on track with their goals.
  • Technology Plays a Critical, Growing Role in Driving Sustainability Initiatives. An overwhelming 86% of sustainability programme managers agree that companies cannot reach their sustainability goals without significantly reducing their technology infrastructure energy usage. This problem will grow more dire as 81% predict the impact of technology infrastructure on a company’s carbon footprint will increase in the next 12 months.
  • Misalignment of IT and Sustainability Teams in Purchasing Decisions. Even as tech’s carbon footprint grows, 59% of respondents say vendors’ sustainability is likely to be overlooked during the vendor selection process. This could be allayed by getting sustainability managers’ input earlier, but nearly 2 in 3 (64%) say they only become involved after the technology purchasing process has already begun.
  • IT Team Support of Company Sustainability Initiatives Is Dire. More than any other function (i.e., finance, leadership, operations), IT was identified as not taking the necessary steps to support their company’s sustainability goals (34%). Only about half (51%) say their IT team is taking proper considerations about sustainability when making decisions about technology purchases.

Industry Significance

Data centres currently account for 1% of global electricity consumption today. The World Economic Forum estimates that digitisation generated 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 alone, however, if brought to scale digital technologies could reduce emissions by 20% by 2050.

Data centres and digitisation play an undeniably important part in any corporate sustainability strategy. While sustainability managers are working towards meeting critical environmental goals, they cannot do so without more sustainable IT infrastructure marked by high efficiency, scalability and simplicity.

As a result, there is a tremendous opportunity for IT professionals to help their organisations make strides in reducing their environmental footprint. By building and adopting sustainable technology infrastructure, supported by innovative, efficient and scalable IT vendors, IT teams have the potential to make a significant and immediate impact through technology engineered to use significantly lower power, lower cooling, and far less waste.

Read the full “Drivers of Change: Pure Storage IT Sustainability Impact Survey 2022” report and methodology. Check out our new Energy Savings Visualizer, which enables organisations to calculate estimated electricity cost savings based on performance or capacity-optimised block, file or object storage.

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