Green Ops: How the cloud can combine sustainability and efficiency

According to a recent Intel survey, 80 per cent of IT managers have sustainability as a priority on their agenda. We at adesso have also noticed that customers increasingly expect IT services to be not only fast and reliable, but also sustainable. Sustainability is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, but an integral part of everyday business.

While many companies are already finding ways to make their business processes more sustainable, IT is at the heart of this transformation. In the context of a more digitalised world, there is no way around the cloud. However, the cloud is not automatically a sustainable solution. It depends on how it is used – and that is precisely what I would like to explore in this article.

Sustainability as a competitive advantage

Companies today face the challenge of holding their own in an increasingly dynamic market. Sustainability plays a key role here: it strengthens competitiveness, increases attractiveness for customers, investors and employees, and meets growing regulatory requirements.

Although there is no direct legal obligation to make IT more sustainable, standards such as ISO 14001 require that all areas of a company contribute to improving environmental performance. This is becoming particularly relevant as the importance of IT in companies continues to grow.

But Green IT is not just a necessary evil. When implemented correctly, it offers tangible benefits: the combination of GreenOps and FinOps can not only increase sustainability, but also significantly reduce cloud costs – freeing up innovation budgets.

The cloud: not automatically sustainable

Cloud services are often marketed as a universal solution for efficiency and sustainability. They promise flexible scalability, better resource utilisation and energy efficiency. But in reality, this narrative should be treated with caution.

The cloud can be more sustainable than on-premise solutions if used correctly. However, many companies use their cloud resources inefficiently, which causes unnecessary costs and CO₂ emissions. Furthermore, cloud providers are often non-transparent in their reporting on sustainability. Choosing the right provider and optimising usage are crucial to fully exploiting the advantages of the cloud.

A framework for sustainable cloud use

Sustainable cloud use requires a well-thought-out interplay of strategy, operational implementation and continuous monitoring. These three levels form a framework that companies can use to optimise their cloud landscape both ecologically and economically.

1. Strategic planning: Setting the right framework

The basis for sustainable cloud use is a clear strategy. This begins with the selection of the cloud provider. Transparency is crucial here: providers should not only disclose their energy sources, but also their hardware lifecycles, Scope 3 emissions and data centre utilisation rates. Companies must ask critical questions here and compare their own sustainability goals with what the providers offer.

But there is more to a strategy than choosing the right partner. Companies should take a holistic view of cloud use and ask themselves which workloads actually belong in the cloud. Sometimes it is more efficient to keep certain applications on-premise, while others are outsourced to regions with renewable energies.

2. Operational optimisation: designing efficient use

The key to sustainable cloud use lies in the efficient use of resources. An overarching concept such as ‘dynamic workload optimisation’ helps to make use more flexible and minimise dependencies.

A central element here is demand orientation. Workloads should be dynamically scaled so that only the resources that are actually needed are used. This requires not only technical solutions, but also a deep understanding of one's own IT landscape: when and where is which service needed?

In addition, the operation of workloads can be optimised in terms of time and geography. Workloads can be executed, for example, in time slots with high availability of renewable energies. This so-called ‘green scheduling’ reconciles the requirements of IT and the environment and helps to significantly reduce the carbon footprint.

3. Continuous monitoring: data as a basis

Sustainability requires transparency – and this can only be guaranteed through continuous monitoring. Companies should not rely exclusively on the tools of the providers, but should use independent solutions that give them a realistic and comparable view of the data.

This also includes the introduction of sustainable cloud reporting. Unlike FinOps, where standards and metrics are widespread, GreenOps is still in its early stages. Nevertheless, companies can use the right tools to analyse the resource consumption of their cloud infrastructure and derive optimisation measures.

The balance between costs and sustainability

While FinOps focuses on optimising cloud costs, GreenOps goes one step further: it aims to combine ecological and economic goals. However, this relationship is not always linear.

Reserved instances, for example, a popular means of reducing costs, can increase the pressure to fully utilise booked capacities – even if this is not sensible from a sustainability perspective. This shows that although costs and sustainability often go hand in hand, they are not always congruent.

The challenge is to exploit synergies between the two objectives. GreenOps offers a way to use resources efficiently without neglecting the ecological potential of the cloud.

GreenOps: the first step towards a sustainable IT strategy

For CIOs, GreenOps offers an excellent opportunity to develop initial flagship projects in the area of sustainable IT. With clear goals and tangible results, they can lay the foundation for a more comprehensive transformation. Resource-efficient IT is not only an obligation towards the environment, but also a competitive advantage in a digitalised world.