Focus Areas

At Future Channel we are committed to three key areas of IT – FinOps, GreenOps and Sustainable IT.

Some background

Data shows that public cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry — a notoriously carbon-intensive segment. A single public data centre can consume the same amount of electricity as 50,000 homes. A public data centre’s annual consumption of 200 terawatts/hour is more than some nation-states’ yearly consumption. Rising consumer pressure and new EU regulatory reporting requirements and the SCOPE reporting requirements, have opened the door to GreenOps.

What Is GreenOps?

Data shows that public cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry — a notoriously carbon-intensive segment. A single public data centre can consume the same amount of electricity as 50,000 homes. A public data centre’s annual consumption of 200 terawatts/hour is more than some nation-states’ yearly consumption. Rising consumer pressure and new EU regulatory reporting requirements and the SCOPE reporting requirements, have opened the door to GreenOps.

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

Where FinOps and GreenOps meet

At a high-level view, GreenOps looks a lot like FinOps. The two share the same overall goal: efficient cloud usage. When a company maximises 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.

So What Now?

There are a number of practical steps any business active in the cloud can take, some of these include:

Reduce emissions with monitoring. Use a carbon monitoring tool to start measuring the current state and to identify opportunities for reducing CO₂ emissions, whether with native tools from your cloud vendor or with solutions that encompass your multicloud environment.

Explore other options. It is important to take a regular look at alternatives to the hyperscalers with benefits including cost, resource usage and speed that may be available by moving to Edge Cloud, bare metal server usage or recycling existing hardware.

Minimize data transfer across regions. Aside from the obvious cost of egress fees, the carbon impact of data transfer can be as high as 3 kg. CO₂e/GB. For cases where redundancy or uptime isn’t a major priority, avoid unnecessary data transfer across regions.

Invest in systems to help you. Aside from the obvious cost benefits, taking control and seeking full visibility of your cloud estate is possibly the easiest way to start on your journey towards more efficiency.

If you would like to learn more about the products and services we offer in these areas, please get in touch.