Green IT questions that get real answers
Most vendor sustainability questionnaires can be passed without a supplier changing anything, because they ask for commitments rather than figures. Five questions with numeric answers will tell you more than a forty-item form — and the most useful one is not about energy at all, it is about how long the vendor keeps your data and how many copies it makes.
Written for whoever has to fill in or evaluate one of these. It applies to any software vendor, with file transfer and storage as the running example.
Why the standard questionnaire fails
The typical form asks: do you have a net-zero commitment, do you have an environmental policy, do you offset your emissions, do you report under a recognised framework.
Every one of those can be answered yes by a supplier that has changed nothing about how it operates. A commitment is a statement about the future. A policy is a document. Offsets are a payment. None of them is a measurement of what the service does today.
Worse, this style of question systematically favours large suppliers, who have compliance departments to produce the documents, over smaller ones who may be materially more efficient but have nobody to write the policy.
The five questions
Each has a numeric or specific answer. A vendor that cannot answer is telling you it does not measure.
1. How long do you retain our data by default, and how many copies do you hold?
The highest-value question and almost never asked. Storage is a continuous energy cost and replication multiplies it. A vendor holding three regional copies indefinitely has a much larger footprint per unit of data than one holding a single copy for thirty days.
It is also a security and compliance question, which is why it earns its place on a form regardless of your environmental interest. Retention is a data protection obligation, not only a cost.
2. Which data centres do you use, in which countries, and who supplies the electricity?
Named facility, named country, named supplier. Grid carbon intensity varies substantially across Europe, so the country is a real variable.
Then the follow-up that separates the claims: is the renewable supply direct, matched by certificates annually, matched hourly, or offset? Those are four different things routinely described with the same word. The distinctions.
3. What is the PUE of the facilities you use, and is it measured or supplied by your host?
Power usage effectiveness. Efficient modern facilities sit near 1.1–1.2.
The second half of the question matters: a vendor renting capacity should say so rather than quoting its host's figure as its own. A supplier that draws that distinction unprompted is being careful, which is itself informative.
4. What is in scope of any carbon claim?
If a vendor says carbon neutral, ask across what. Scope 1 and 2 only, or including scope 3 — the supply chain and hardware manufacturing, which is usually where most of it sits.
Excluding scope 3 quietly is standard practice and is the difference between a meaningful claim and a marketing one.
5. What have you actually changed in the last two years, with a figure?
The question that cannot be answered from a template. A real answer sounds like "we consolidated from four regions to two and cut storage volume 30% by implementing default expiry". A non-answer sounds like "sustainability is core to our values".
Scoring the answers
Weight them by actual effect, which is close to the inverse of how vendors present them:
- Retention and replication. Largest effect. Rarely volunteered.
- Energy source. Direct supply beats hourly matching beats annual matching beats offsets.
- Grid location. Real, second-order.
- PUE. Real, smaller.
- Certifications, neutrality claims, tree planting. Weakest evidence. Not worthless, but not a substitute for the four above.
Do not accidentally exclude the efficient suppliers
A questionnaire demanding a published environmental policy, third-party certification and framework-aligned reporting will screen out small suppliers regardless of their actual footprint. Sometimes those requirements are genuinely necessary. Often they are inherited from a template.
If you want the option of buying from efficient small suppliers, allow direct answers to the five questions above as an alternative to certification. You will get better information and a wider field.
Two questions worth adding
What happens to our data when the contract ends? Deletion timeline, including from backups. Environmental and compliance relevance at once.
Where are backups held? Primary storage in one country with backups in another is a common gap on both the carbon and the jurisdiction sheets. Jurisdiction is its own question and it usually matters more than the energy one.
My own answers
Since I am proposing a form, here is what I would submit for Yungle, unflattering parts included.
One server in Germany on renewable power. One primary copy, not three regional replicas — an efficiency choice that is also an availability choice, and you should ask me question one about it just as you would anyone else. Free transfers expire after 7 days; paid collections do not expire, which is worse on this measure and is a feature customers want. A tenth of profit goes to rainforest protection, which is a donation and not evidence about electricity. I do not publish a PUE because I rent capacity rather than run a facility, and quoting my host's figure as mine would fail question three.
That is the shape of an answer you can check. It is what to expect from anyone worth buying from.