Integrating GreenOps into your FinOps practice: Common ground, trade-offs and starting points
What are FinOps and GreenOps?
FinOps and GreenOps are people, processes and tools that help you increase the efficiency of your cloud operations.
While FinOps is about maximising the business value of cloud and achieving your savings potential, GreenOps focuses on minimising the environmental impact of your cloud resources.
What GreenOps means for FinOps teams
More and more businesses are looking to implement GreenOps solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of the cloud. The teams, processes and governance already in place for FinOps will likely be responsible for this implementation.
There is significant overlap between FinOps and GreenOps solutions, however. That’s good news, because it means GreenOps doesn’t need to be seen as something entirely new.
Let’s take a closer look at how GreenOps can add onto your existing FinOps practice because of their shared common ground.
Common ground: How GreenOps and FinOps intersect
Both FinOps and GreenOps are about making sure you only use what you need in the cloud. This means there are ways GreenOps can latch onto existing FinOps processes.
Let’s consider 6 examples of how environmental impact might be considered alongside FinOps:
- Building sustainability into standard design and operational practices
For example: There are always technical requirements and choices made when designing an application. At this initial stage of development, GreenOps might look like setting a carbon footprint goal for an application.
The team might set this goal, and then choose a renewable-powered data centre to support delivery for the application to help them meet that goal.
- Optimising cloud consumption and reducing wastage
For example: Using only what you need and ensuring you’re not wasting capacity, such as only ever using 200GB of a 1PB application.
The team might reduce the application capacity, and GreenOps dashboards would then reflect the associated carbon emission reductions, as well as the cost savings.
- Setting and implementing carbon reduction KPIs
For example: Being able to set up carbon reduction KPIs, explain usage trends and follow progress.
Setting up the right dashboards for proper spend visibility is already part of sustaining a FinOps practice. GreenOps would involve this additional KPI integrated into the same dashboards used for FinOps.
- Code efficiency
For example: Considering carbon consumption when selecting a language model.
The team already needs to select a language model for the cloud application. If environmental impact is prioritised, the team would give energy consumption a higher priority than other factors when selecting a language model.
- Service sizing
For example: Ensuring you deliver the right services to the right customers, based on their required functionality.
- Asset utilisation
For example: Having no idle resources and making sure you’re actually using the assets you’re provisioning. Like service sizing, this would be part of the optimisations a FinOps team already makes.
Just like FinOps, GreenOps involves managing cloud resources, and this drives improvements to both workload efficiency and sustainability.
Making trade-offs: How GreenOps and FinOps diverge
Usage optimisations will often reduce both costs and carbon emissions, but there may be situations in which FinOps and GreenOps differ. Let’s consider an example.
Your team wants to create a new application, and needs to choose between two data centres for the data delivery:
- Data centre 1 is lower-cost, but produces higher carbon emissions
- Data centre 2 is higher-cost, but produces lower carbon emissions because it runs on renewables
A traditional FinOps approach might mean choosing data centre 1 for its cost savings, while GreenOps might mean going with data centre 2 for its carbon efficiency.
A trade-off will therefore be necessary, between cost and sustainability, or more specifically, between meeting cost reduction and carbon footprint targets.
One way to approach this trade-off might be to prioritise smarter cloud usage, that is, cut waste that is costing the business excess money and carbon emissions. This could strengthen the case to enable investment in the occasional higher-cost, more sustainable option.
Still, considering the environmental impact of IT operations will not always lead to more costs. Let’s look at some of the financial and other benefits you get when you implement GreenOps.
5 reasons businesses are implementing GreenOps right now
1. It helps you save money and reduce your carbon emissions
GreenOps involves reducing wastage in the cloud. Businesses waste on average 20-25% of the value of their cloud resources.
FinOps and GreenOps set you up to only use (and pay for) what you need in the cloud. This cuts your cloud waste, thereby reducing your carbon emissions and your cloud bills.
2. It makes it easier to meet with new ESG regulations
Stricter ESG reporting requirements (from the CSRD and other new EU regulations) are driving increased pressure on CIOs, CTOs, and FinOps teams to improve the sustainability of IT resources, including the cloud.
GreenOps helps businesses track cloud usage, both to manage cloud spend but also energy consumption.
This not only makes it easier to report on data around sustainability, but to understand and visualise this data, to improve the environmental impact of your IT operations.
3. It aligns with existing sustainability objectives
Most companies in Europe will already have company-wide sustainability objectives in place. With the CSRD, businesses in the EU will be required to improve their sustainability.
Optimising cloud usage through GreenOps is the best lever businesses have to improve IT-related emissions.
4. It helps you meet customer expectations around sustainability
Customers and end users are increasingly looking to work with or purchase from environmentally responsible businesses.
Minimising the environmental impact of your cloud resources helps you meet rising expectations from customers around carbon footprints and sustainable practices.
5. It optimises operations using an established framework
FinOps and GreenOps both support you in meeting targets around spend and service optimisation.
GreenOps implementation, for example, follows a 6-pillar framework that evaluates your sustainability strategy, design principles and operations, among others, to help you progress your cost-efficiency and sustainability ambitions in a proven, effective way.
Implementing GreenOps: Where to start
Regardless of your current sustainable IT knowledge and skills levels, you can start optimising your cloud resources to save money and minimise environmental impact.
Considering the environmental impact of cloud is a relatively new priority for many businesses. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about getting started.
And getting started might not be as complicated as businesses think. A smart place to start is a GreenOps assessment.
When you book a GreenOps assessment, you learn more about what you would gain from implementing one or more possible usage optimisations.
We help you determine which actions make the most sense for your business based on your cost-efficiency and sustainability goals.
Contact Us .
Let’s discuss how we can help with your sustainable cloud journey.
