Let's start with some basics:

• An average outsourced data center uses as much electricity as 50000 Californian homes.
• AWS (Amazon Web Services) has become the world's largest investor in renewable energy. Its direct competitors are not far behind in terms of alternative energy investment.

AWS and its competitors are focusing on alternative energy sources to keep their data centers running.

• Dala centers produce more emissions than the global aviation industry that carries 5 billion passengers a year.

Although the aviation industry is perceived as one of the worst contributors to CO2 emissions, it contributes 23% less to GHG emissions than date centers and invests heavily in alternative fuel research.

The shift from cooling data centers with a latticed network of thin water pipes from air cooling to reduce emissions is also coming with a huge increase in water depletion, particularly in the southern hemisphere where water scarcity is a threat to local populations.

• And as pointed out in an MIT article "the cloud is not silent" and it never sleeps. The constant drone and vibrations felt from Orange County to Hyderabad have triggered a surge in mental health and developmental disorders.
• There is no panacea such as relocating data centers to cold polar regions as the latency between those regions and users further south (Europe, Asia Pacific and The Americas) would impact business productivity.

Today CIOs are faced with the dilemma of addressing increasing data needs and being environmental stewards across the enterprise to address these challenges and plan for sustainable growth and scalability. Studies have shown that the multiplicity of medium to large size data centers is driving the increase in emissions and that a radical shift to hyperscaling (the consolidation of data centers into single extremely large ones)pic of a giant data center in the desert could reduce cloud emissions by 25% within the next 5 years. CIOs need to consider this reality.

However, 4 key challenges remain:

1. The scarcity of hyperscaling providers is growing due to unprecedented post pandemic growth in demand.
2. A multiplicity of small to medium size data center providers has attracted private investors seeing an almost endless opportunity.
3. CIOs are still reluctant to entrust their data storage to external providers.
4. Governments are racing to develop local data center hubs focused on small to medium size infrastructures and position their nation on the global "cyber-map".

Today CIOs are faced with an environmental challenge that will not go away with less regulation or changes in the global socio-political environment. The choices they make in how they manage their data needs directly affect local populations (hence consumers) and their enterprise's brand perception. After decades of being focused on "keeping the lights on" CIOs have now the ability to drive a true strategic cultural shift across the entire organization's data governance while still focusing on providing inning innovative operational tools to enable growth.