IT can play a major role in driving sustainability

With data centers alone consuming around 1% of global electricity demand, IT departments have substantial influence on their organization’s sustainability goals.

Significantly reducing the amount of energy used to run workloads and business processes, however, requires intelligent automation, deep visibility, reducing shadow IT and optimizing CI/CD pipelines.

Intelligent automation

The State of FinOps 2021 report revealed that 39% of financial operations professionals’ number one problem is getting engineers to take action when cloud inefficiencies are identified. This inaction means a lot of money and energy is being wasted unnecessarily.

IT departments can make dramatic reductions in their use of electricity by leveraging intelligent automation and resource management. With an advanced, automated alert and visualization system, developers and other stakeholders across the organization can always be informed of the environmental impact of the decisions they make throughout their day.

For example, if a developer is provisioning a public cloud resource and a less energy-intensive option is available, they could receive a notification alerting them to the issue and suggesting the greener option.

Such a system could also leverage built-in guardrails to automatically turn off idle resources that are no longer in use, such as zombie VMs, neglected development environments and resources left running overnight and on weekends. When you don’t have to manually chase people down to remind them to turn things off or check recommitments with spreadsheets, less energy is wasted and less carbon is burned.

Deep visibility

The lack of visibility is one of the most pressing challenges in optimizing mutlicloud, multitool environments and truly realizing their benefits.

Major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP provide visibility tools, and they even offer tools that enable enterprises to measure carbon usage. However, these tools are cloud-native, which means they only work on that vendor’s products and services.