GreenOps
At the heart of FinOps is the best practice goal of using the right resources when you need them. This optimises cost, but is equally beneficial for the environment, optimising your cloud carbon emissions, and contributing responsibly to a more sustainable future.
GreenOps is an operating model that combines business practices and technologies aimed at optimising the efficiency of the cloud whilst also minimising its environmental impact. It is essentially a sub-set or derivation of FinOps and uses the principle of improving the carbon efficiency of cloud and SaaS by using lower carbon-impacting resources, to decrease carbon emissions output and reduce costs.
Change doesn’t need to be difficult, but it does need to happen.
Why?
· 2025 - 11.7k of Europe’s largest organisations will have to report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from their 2024 fiscal year, under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
· 2026 - This will be extended to a further estimated 50k companies in the EU who will have to report their GHG emissions from 2025.
· 2028 - This will be extended to non-EU companies and their European subsidiaries.
Source: EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting
So what?
Sound carbon emissions practice = bragging rights =
good PR = attractive to do business with.
But also comes with ethical responsibility.
Under the EU rules, companies can have their green claims verified before using them in advertising — with fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for those that fail to comply.
Check out one of our case studies here.
What is required to be measured and reported?
Greenhouse Gas Protocols Scopes 1, 2 and 3 are the universally accepted and recognised way of categorising the different kinds of carbon emissions a company creates in its own operations and wider value chain.
These are the accountable scopes for which companies will have to report:
· Scope 1 emissions (Direct)
These are from sources an organisation owns or controls directly. For example, fuel used in a company vehicle fleet (if not electrically powered).
· Scope 2 emissions (Indirect)
Are emissions a company causes indirectly from the energy it purchases and uses? For example, the emissions caused when generating electricity used in company premises.
· Scope 3 emissions (Upstream & Downstream)
Are not produced by a company itself or activities from assets it owns, but those it’s indirectly responsible for through its supply or value chain.
For example, the products a company buys uses and disposes of from suppliers. This includes cloud and SaaS services.
Source: National Grid: What are Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions?
How does this align with GreenOps?
Cloud customers have several choices:
· Use it
· Don’t use it
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· Use it more carbon efficiently and at a lower cost.
Scope 3 Upstream cloud reporting tools are native, available, ready and waiting and can be integrated with Carbon Level Agreements for customers within a managed service agreement for advice, recommendations and remediation, and for CSRD reporting.
Cloud service providers, including Oracle Cloud, Google, AWS and Microsoft all provide natively available carbon optimisation analysis and reporting tools for customers to gain insights and information about the amount of carbon emissions their cloud use is generating.
With specific reference to Microsoft, they provide several native tools available that analyse, report and make recommendations for improving, or at least limiting the amount of carbon emissions created as a result of our cloud consumption, such as:
· Microsoft’s Sustainability Manager
· Azure and Microsoft 365 Emissions Impact Dashboards
· Azure Carbon Optimisation
Across these 3 tenets, Microsoft provides a range of carbon insights, and advice and guidance to customers to do more, using less carbon and at a lower cost.
1. Microsoft’s Sustainability Manager
· Sustainability Manager is a chargeable service, starting at $4k per Azure tenant, per month.
· It provides comprehensive, integrated and automated sustainability management for organisations at any stage of their journey.
· Designed to enable enterprise organisations to more efficiently record, report and reduce their emissions and water or waste impact.
· The key items here are the reporting capabilities to conform toCSRD and the inclusion of water and waste impact, which are both difficult to measure (without tooling) and fundamental component parts of forthcoming legislation.
2. Azure and Microsoft 365 Emissions Impact Dashboards
· This tool is available for Microsoft CSP Partners free of charge to provide insights into their customers’ carbon emissions impact for both Azure and Microsoft 365 usage.
· It includes pre-populated Power BI Dashboards, built on Microsoft Fabric.
· The tool provides advanced sustainability analytics and reporting for scopes 1, 2, and 3.
· As a reporting tool (based on historic usage) it does not provide recommendations for improving (or reducing) carbon emissions.
3. Azure Carbon Optimisation
· Free-of-charge service within a customer’s Azure portal.
· This tool is designed to aid customers in making emissions optimisation decisions using emissions insights and recommendations.
· It provides advanced sustainability analytics and reporting for scopes 1, 2, 3
· The tool analyses historic data by subscription, resource group, service and location and provides recommendations for reducing carbon emissions by using alternative resources which are more efficient and less expensive — for example, changing a VM type.
What often makes financial sense, makes environmental sense
As part of a FinOps lens, Version 1 can provide a view of customers’ on-premises carbon emissions through our carbon emissions calculator and combine this with a TCO and ROI analysis of the business case for migrating to the cloud.
Similarly, we can analyse and report on carbon optimisation opportunities across OCI, Google, AWS and Microsoft, with and for customers. This will help leverage the benefits from more carbon-efficient use of cloud resources to both lower carbon emissions and reduce the cost of resource consumption to achieve both a carbon and cost-optimised position.
Additionally, implementing Carbon Level Agreements (CLA) as part of our ASPIRE Managed Service underpins the monitoring, measuring and improvement of your sustainability goals.
Further details can be found here: https://www.version1.com/blog/aspire-managed-services/
To understand how Version 1 can help optimise your cloud carbon and cost positions, please contact us at www.version1.com/talk-to-us
About the author
William Nelson is a Sales Specialist/License Management Practice here at Version 1.
