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The consistent, high-usage profile of data centers may lead us to believe that cloud data centers are markedly more sustainable than private cloud data centers. But data shows that the public cloud now has a more significant carbon footprint than the airline industrya notoriously carbon-intensive segment. A single public data center can consume the same amount of electricity as 50,000 homes. A public data center's annual consumption of 200 terawatts/hour is more than some nation-states' annual consumption. Rising consumer pressure and new E.U. regulatory reporting requirements, such as Germany's Energy Efficiency Act that mandates a 26.5% reduction in carbon emissions from 2008 levels by the year 2030, have opened the door to GreenOps.

GreenOps is the practice of minimizing a cloud environment's carbon footprint through the efficient use of cloud resources. This means far more than just reducing the energy required to power a data center and the water used to cool it. Other factors, such as the data center's physical footprint, type of installed power, size of data volumes, temperature set points in the data center, reuse of secondary heat, and even renewable energy, all contribute to the calculation of CO emissions. By September 2024, the Data Centers in Europe reporting program, a European Energy Efficiency Directive subsidiary, will require European organizations to report onallof these factors.

While Europe is leading the charge, other regulations and initiatives around the world promote more sustainable energy consumption models: the SECs Climate-Related Disclosures/ESG Investing in the U.S., the National Renewable Energy Development Plan in China, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Regulations, and the National Solar Mission in India, to name but few.

From a high-level perspective, GreenOps looks a lot like FinOps. After all, the two share the same goal: efficient cloud usage. When a company maximizes efficiency, two obvious effects are 1) lower costs and 2) lower carbon emissions. The same FinOps tasks of right-sizing, storage tiering, deleting idle and unattached resources, and scheduling compute off time are also used in GreenOps to achieve lower carbon emissions. Closing outlast years AWS re:Invent, Werner Vogels reinforced this sentiment when he said, "Cost is a close proxy for sustainability"a ringing validation of the tightly integrated relationship between FinOps and GreenOps.

New E.U. regulatory reporting requirements, along with increased consumer and shareholder pressure, will create the case for more efficient and, therefore, more sustainable use of the cloud worldwide. For example, new technologies that use water instead of air to cool data centers have shown up to a 95% reduction in CO. Still, sustainability isnt solely the public cloud providers responsibility. Forrester recommends that companies take the following actions:

These are some of the easier immediate actions that organizations can take to minimize their carbon footprint and maximize the value of their investment in the cloud, but not the only ones.

The original article ishere.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/aapsky

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GreenOps, FinOps, and the Sustainable Cloud - CDOTrends