If you’ve worked in cloud or infrastructure for any length of time, you’ve probably seen the sustainability conversation start and stall more than once. It usually begins with a dashboard or a slide, some neat metric about energy efficiency, maybe a target for the year, and ends with a polite “we’ll review this next quarter.”
The problem isn’t that teams don’t care. It’s that sustainability still gets treated like a technical metric rather than a collective habit. Numbers like PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) are important, but they only tell part of the story. The real shift happens when the conversation stops being about sustainability and starts becoming part of how people design, deploy, and make decisions every day.
So, how do we actually get there?
Understanding the Limits of Metrics
Let’s start with the obvious: metrics matter, but they’re not magic.
PUE, for example, measures how efficiently a data centre uses energy. A PUE of 1.2 sounds impressive, and it usually is, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of energy you’re using or how often workloads are sitting idle.
Metrics are snapshots, not behaviours. They help us see where we are, but they don’t change what we do. It’s a bit like checking your step count without ever putting your shoes on.
That’s why the next phase of cloud sustainability has to move beyond dashboards and into culture; into people, habits, and shared ownership.
Bring Everyone Into the Room
Sustainability works best when it stops living exclusively in the IT department. You need finance, operations, procurement, and leadership in the same conversation, because decisions about budgets, vendor choices, and working hours all ripple into cloud energy use.
For example, a finance manager signing off on reserved instances can influence how efficiently those resources are used months down the line. A project lead choosing a data region for latency reasons might not realise the renewable energy mix differs dramatically between options.
The trick is to make sustainability visible in those discussions without turning it into an extra layer of paperwork.
Try this:
- Add a “sustainability check” bullet to project kick-off templates.
- Include a single line in procurement requests asking, “What’s the greenest option that still meets our performance needs?”
- Encourage teams to show small wins, like migrating one workload to a renewable-heavy region or automating shutdowns outside office hours.
If it becomes part of the workflow rather than an external audit, people actually start doing it.
Empower the People Who Can Make a Difference
Developers, engineers, and architects are the real sustainability force multipliers. They’re the ones who can right-size instances, design stateless services, and decide whether a job runs in milliseconds or minutes.
Instead of broad, company-wide targets that feel abstract, give technical teams autonomy and visibility. Let them track the impact of their choices in real time.
It’s a simple but powerful shift, when people can see the difference their changes make (less cost, lower runtime, fewer resources), sustainability stops feeling like a distant ESG box-tick and starts feeling like good engineering practice.
You could even gamify it a bit. Some teams have success running “green code” challenges, seeing who can reduce compute time or emissions the most in a sprint. It’s light-hearted but drives real progress.
Leadership’s Role Isn’t Just Setting Targets
Executives often get told to “lead by example,” but in sustainability, it’s more about enabling by design. The people at the top don’t need to know the intricacies of autoscaling; they need to make sure teams have the time, tools, and flexibility to prioritise greener options.
A manager who gives their engineers a half-day to clean up old workloads does more for sustainability than a dozen memos about company values. The same goes for budget planning: allowing space for experimentation, like testing a new green region, encourages practical change.
It’s not glamorous leadership; it’s facilitative. But it works.
The Human Side of Data
There’s another part of this equation that’s easy to miss: how sustainability feels to the people involved. Teams under constant delivery pressure will always prioritise deadlines over optimisations, not because they don’t care, but because urgency trumps ideals.
That’s why it helps to frame sustainability not as an extra task but as a smarter way of working.
- Efficient code runs faster and costs less.
- Smarter region selection reduces latency and emissions.
- Decommissioning unused environments cuts clutter for everyone.
The more people see that these actions make their lives easier, the more naturally they adopt them.
It’s also worth recognising effort publicly. Celebrate the small wins in internal channels, “we cut idle time by 30% this month”, or share success stories in company newsletters. Recognition builds momentum.
Sustainability as Shared Language
When sustainability becomes a shared language, it stops being a specialist subject. It becomes something people mention in meetings without needing to over-explain it.
Imagine hearing phrases like:
- “Can we deploy that closer to the renewable region?”
- “Let’s check the energy footprint before scaling that up.”
- “We can probably refactor that job to run off-peak.”
That’s what a mature culture sounds like, not performative, just practical.
To get there, sustainability needs to show up everywhere people talk about performance, cost, and design. Not as a side topic, but as one of the core variables.
It’s About People, Not Perfection
No team will get it perfect. Workloads will slip through, budgets will tighten, and old habits will return from time to time. That’s okay.
What matters is consistency; keeping sustainability visible enough that it can’t quietly fall off the agenda.
If you’re leading a team, start small:
- Pick one process (like environment cleanup or deployment scheduling) and make it visibly greener.
- Involve people in defining what “green” actually means for your context.
- Focus on improvement, not purity.
And if you’re an individual contributor, don’t underestimate your influence. The best sustainability work often starts from someone quietly deciding to make their code run better, their environment cleaner, or their deployment smarter.
Cloud sustainability isn’t just about watts and workloads. It’s about people; their decisions, their collaboration, and their willingness to see impact as a shared responsibility.
PUE can measure the power. But it’s the people who decide what it’s really for.
As the CEO of Disruptive LIVE, Kate has a demonstrated track record of driving business growth and innovation. With over 10 years of experience in the tech industry, I have honed my skills in marketing, customer experience, and operations management.
As a forward-thinking leader, I am passionate about helping businesses leverage technology to stay ahead of the competition and exceed customer expectations. I am always excited to connect with like-minded professionals to discuss industry trends, best practices, and new opportunities.
