IT sustainability is not only about reducing energy use or emissions. In a July 2023 CIO profile, Rackspace Technology’s CTO Srini Koushik described a broader approach with three connected dimensions: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and equitable sustainability. Together, they ask leaders to consider how technology affects energy and emissions, people’s access to opportunity, and fairness in the systems they build.
What does sustainability mean beyond going green?
Koushik’s framework treats sustainability as an operational and social question as well as an environmental one. Rackspace had previously described the same three-part framework in a 2022 company post. Rackspace’s 2022 framework post and the 2023 CIO profile provide the company’s and publication’s explanations of the approach.
- Environmental sustainability: Consider energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions in the technology estate, including where workloads run and how infrastructure is operated.
- Economic sustainability: Consider whether people and communities can access jobs, broadband, and technology resources, and whether workers can adapt as technology changes.
- Equitable sustainability: Consider whether the data and algorithms behind digital systems treat people fairly, including in generative AI applications.
The dimensions connect: a technology decision can affect infrastructure, organizational capability, workers’ livelihoods, and users’ experience at once. Koushik told CIO: “CIOs have an opportunity to take the leadership position on sustainability because organizations are getting more heavily dependent on technology,” he says. “It’s just a question of choice.”
How Rackspace described applying the framework
The examples in the 2023 profile show how the three dimensions can influence IT operations. They are a historical account of Rackspace’s practices at that time, not confirmation of its current workload design.
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Environmental: make infrastructure and workload choices deliberately
The profile reported that Rackspace consolidated infrastructure, moved workloads to cloud locations where it could access greener energy, used serverless options where possible in public cloud, and tuned virtual machines for applications that had not yet been modernized. These are examples of choices an IT organization may evaluate; the article did not quantify their emissions impact or compare the lifecycle emissions of public cloud and private cloud.
At the time the feature was published in July 2023, Rackspace reported that 60% of its workloads were on Google Cloud and 40% were in its private cloud. That split is a dated snapshot, not a current allocation. Nor does a move to cloud, by itself, establish that a workload’s emissions will fall: energy sourcing, workload fit, reliability, and the quality of provider reporting all matter.
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Economic: give workers a path as infrastructure changes
Moving away from managing on-premises servers can change what skills an organization needs. The CIO profile said Rackspace used its TOPs program to train data-center engineers in cloud technologies or SaaS models. Koushik explained the underlying workforce concern: “If you’re moving to an environment where you’re not managing servers anymore, the Linux engineers need a path forward,” Koushik says. “What we must do is continuously train our people. We have some of the best Linux engineers and we can’t leave them behind.”
That makes training part of a sustainability decision rather than an afterthought: leaders should consider what happens to existing roles when systems, services, and operating models change.
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Equitable: examine the data and algorithms
The profile also raised the risk that data and algorithms can encode or produce bias, including in generative AI. Koushik said Rackspace wanted to help customers use the technology responsibly: “We believe in the potential of generative AI and we want to help our customers get there, but we want to help them do it in a responsible and sustainable manner,” he says.
Why sustainability can compete with immediate operational priorities
The CIO feature reported results from an IDC survey of 465 data-center decision makers in January 2023. Among the enterprise and service-provider decision makers surveyed, capacity was the leading priority, followed by power and cooling reliability; sustainability ranked fifth. The article said respondents expected sustainability to rise into the top three provider-selection criteria within two years. This is a dated survey result as reported by CIO, not evidence of current buyer priorities.
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The ordering helps explain the practical challenge: organizations need capacity and dependable operations, while sustainability must be considered alongside them. Comparing providers or architectures therefore requires more than a green-energy claim or a cloud-versus-private-cloud label.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to assess sustainability in an IT decision
Use a consistent set of questions for infrastructure, provider, and modernization choices. The 2023 profile offers operational examples, but it does not provide a comparative lifecycle analysis or emissions figures for different deployment models.
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- Energy and emissions evidence: What emissions or energy data does the provider disclose, and what boundary or workload does it cover?
- Energy sourcing: What is established about the energy serving the relevant location and workload?
- Workload fit and reliability: Does the proposed environment meet the application’s technical and resilience needs?
- Cost and access: What are the economic implications, and who gains access to the resulting technology or services?
- Workforce transition: Which roles and skills will change, and what training or redeployment path is available?
- Accessibility and bias risk: Have data, algorithms, and user experiences been examined for unfair or exclusionary outcomes?
- Reporting quality: Can the provider’s claims be understood and assessed, rather than treated as an unsupported label?
This approach avoids assuming that one deployment model is inherently sustainable. It makes the decision depend on evidence about the specific workload and on its effects beyond infrastructure.
What Rackspace says about its later climate target
Rackspace’s 2025 Sustainability Report says that its science-based targets were validated by the Science Based Targets initiative and set a company net-zero target for 2045. This is the company’s reported target, not a claim that net zero has already been achieved. Rackspace’s 2025 Sustainability Report is the source for that later commitment; it does not establish that the operational details or workload split described in the 2023 profile remain current. Rackspace’s sustainability page describes renewable energy and conservation as parts of its strategy.
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