Globally, the demand for cloud and AI is skyrocketing. While it brings immense power, it also spikes up the demand for resources, especially back-end support. This directly leads to growing operational costs and environmental footprints for every organization that leverages a cloud infrastructure. Bringing us to a consequential question about optimizing the cloud from a resource management and cost optimization perspective.
Quoting a recent Business Insider article, “The International Energy Agency found that in 2024, data centers accounted for 1.5% of global electricity use. By 2030, that number could nearly double, reaching levels just above Japan's current annual energy consumption.” It further mentions, “AI infrastructure is cooled with enormous amounts of water. A report from the University of Tulsa found that a single facility can use up to 5 million gallons per day, enough to supply thousands of homes. With governments and companies pouring billions into AI infrastructure, those resource demands are only expected to grow.”
Yes, the Cloud is indispensable, and it promises scalability and agility for your business. And for the most part, it does deliver. However, there is an issue that often goes unnoticed, which is cloud waste. You might see it as hidden charges on your monthly AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) bill.
Let’s look at some obvious reasons for this, such as, the idle virtual machines, unused storage, and oversized databases. These increase your spending and increase your cloud’s carbon footprint.
But there’s a way to tackle both the cost and the environmental impact at the same time. It’s called GreenOps, and it fits naturally into your existing cloud infrastructure management.
What is cloud waste?
Cloud waste happens when you are paying for cloud resources that aren't being used. It's like leaving all the lights and computers on in the office over the weekend when no one’s present. The systems are running, the meter is ticking, but there's no real work being done.
A team might spin up a virtual machine to test a feature and forget to shut it down. That machine keeps running, quietly adding to the monthly bill. Or a database might be set up with far more capacity than it needs, just to be safe. That extra capacity costs more, even if it's never used.
Consider your load balancers. While essential for distributing web traffic, they can often keep running, resulting in increased costs long after the specific event or period of high traffic they were deployed for has ended. This means that you are paying for an active resource that is no longer serving its intended purpose as there's no traffic for it to manage.
Cloud waste hits your budget as every unused resource uses energy, contributing to your carbon emissions.
A Financial Express article from 2024 states, “A recent survey by Everest Group revealed that 82% of global organizations struggle with more than 10% of their cloud spend getting wasted, out of which 68% experience more than 20%. It further found that 38% of organizations experience more than 30% of their cloud spend getting wasted. This waste is often due to overprovisioning of resources, inefficient usage of resources, and the lack of cost optimization measures.”
Leading us to our next stop, GreenOps or Green Cloud Operations.
What is GreenOps?
GreenOps helps manage your cloud infrastructure with both cost and environmental impact into perspective. It blends sustainability along with performance and budgeting. GreenOps helps your teams make decisions that reduce cloud waste, boost cloud resource utilization, optimizes costs, and helps lower energy consumption.
It doesn't replace your current cloud management practices. Instead, it builds on them by adding carbon awareness to how you design, deploy, and leverage the cloud.
In practical terms, GreenOps is about:
- Tracking emissions alongside cost and usage
- Designing systems that do more with less
- Choosing cloud regions powered by cleaner energy
- Shutting down or scaling back unused resources
- Embedding sustainability into team workflows and goals
By integrating these practices, your organization can align cloud operations with sustainability goals without adding complexity.
GreenOps, an evolution of FinOps for holistic optimization
In a 2024 article, Deloitte had predicted that $21 billion may be saved by companies implementing FinOps tools and practices in 2025 alone, and this could grow in subsequent years. Some may even cut cloud costs as much as 40%. It further stated, ”Going forward, we expect companies without a FinOps team to act swiftly to implement first steps, and we expect FinOps veterans to develop more sophisticated optimization strategies.”
If you’re already using FinOps (Finance and DevOps) to manage cloud spending, then GreenOps adds a sustainability layer. While FinOps focuses on cost, GreenOps focuses on both cost and energy use.
GreenOps encourages your teams to build and run cloud systems that are efficient in how they use both money and energy. It brings together cost control, resource optimization, and environmental awareness.
In many cases, the most cost-efficient setup is also the most energy-efficient one.
How to start with GreenOps
You don’t need to start from scratch. GreenOps can fit into your current workflows easily. Here's a basic approach:
Step 1: Get visibility
You can’t reduce what you can’t see.
- Use built-in tools: AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer carbon footprint tracking
- Tag your resources: Label by team, project, and environment to track usage and impact
- Consolidate dashboards: Bring cost and carbon data into one place to help teams understand their footprint
Step 2: Act
Once you know where the waste is, start correcting it.
- Match resources to actual usage
- Shut down non-production environments after hours
- Clean up idle and unused resources: Old snapshots, unused volumes, zombie VMs, etc.
- Optimize your architecture:
- Run workloads in regions powered by cleaner energy
- Use serverless options where possible, since they scale down when not in use
Step 3: Foster a culture
Long-term impact comes from making sustainability part of your everyday operations.
- Give teams the right data: Make it easy to see usage, cost, and emissions
- Encourage efficient design: Add sustainability checks to your deployment process
- Recognize improvements: Highlight teams that cut both cost and emissions
Why does GreenOps makes sense for your business?
GreenOps delivers tangible benefits for your business goals, alongside its environmental contributions. It helps lower cloud bills by making better use of resources, reduces emissions to support your ESG objectives, and leads to leaner systems that simply perform better. It further helps you to gain improved visibility and control across your teams and enhance readiness for new compliance or reporting requirements.
A Deloitte article focusing on FinOps for Cloud optimization, emphasizes, “FinOps should be viewed as a long-term practice, integral to operational strategy. It should not be seen as a simple fix. It starts with cost reduction, but it can eventually transform cloud spending from a mere line item into a strategic asset and enabler.”
FinOps and GreenOps work together, combining cost management with energy awareness. With a combined approach, they help you run a much more efficient cloud.
The first step is simple. Look at your current usage and emissions. The results can show you where to begin.
Want help identifying waste and improving efficiency? Schedule a consultation today with the Covasant team.
