# Sustainability pillar The sustainability pillar focuses on environmental sustainability. Sustainability in the cloud is a continuous effort focused primarily on energy reduction and efficiency across all components of a workload by achieving the maximum benefit from the resources provisioned and minimizing the total resources required. This effort can include: + The initial selection of an efficient programming language. + The adoption of modern algorithms. + The use of efficient data storage techniques. + The deployment of correctly sized and efficient compute infrastructure. + The minimization of requirements for high-powered end-user hardware.