What is Sustainable FinOps?
FinOps is a cloud financial management discipline that tracks and optimizes cloud spending. It gives teams throughout the organization a framework for managing their cloud costs and fosters a culture where teams take accountability for their cloud usage.
GreenOps, on the other hand, focuses on implementing sustainable practices to reduce the carbon footprint of the organization’s cloud operations. For example, GreenOps teams might advise relocating cloud resources to providers or regions that use sustainable energy sources.
The Sustainable FinOps approach we’ve developed at Capgemini combines these disciplines to give organizations a powerful way to optimize their cloud spend while reducing their environmental impact.
Sustainable FinOps provides a single management framework and a unified dashboard, tailored to the needs of different stakeholders, including business and technology decision-makers and engineering teams.
By creating a shared understanding of the costs and environmental impact of cloud usage, Sustainable FinOps allows teams from across the organization to:
Streamline FinOps and GreenOps processes
Identify issues and address them more effectively
Proactively mitigate potential issues
Collaborate to make data-driven decisions about cloud consumption
Link cost and sustainability optimization actions to strategic business outcomes
Greater awareness of the issues, clearly defined accountability, and a culture of collaboration help increase employee engagement and encourage conscious cloud consumption. This can significantly reduce the wastage that leads to ever-growing costs and carbon footprints.
Beyond the short-term cost reduction and CO2 savings, Sustainable FinOps is about achieving long-term resilience as the organization’s digital landscape evolves. Connecting cloud usage and engineering decisions to financial and sustainability goals ensures that future cloud investments can generate business value at the lowest cost and environmental impact.
