Cloud Management Platforms Drive Cost Savings and Sustainability
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Despite changing language, sustainability has remained a priority in corporate boardrooms. 83% of businesses in the G7 are still committed to achieving net zero goals and 84% of institutional investors plan to increase the proportion of sustainable assets under management in their portfolios by 2028.
As focus grows on the environmental impact of Information Technologies like GenAI and sourcing rare earth minerals, optimizing cloud usage and spend is emerging as an important opportunity for companies to achieve their carbon emissions goals while reducing costs. WWT is proud to help our customers deploy the top cloud optimization tools and to offer cloud spend and emissions reports to enable our existing clients to begin to analyze opportunities to reduce their OpEx and environmental impact.
It's time to make conscientious cloud decisions
Cloud offers the opportunity to significantly reduce carbon emissions from data centers. Compared with on-premise data center environments, leading cloud service providers (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS) use economies of scale to drive efficiencies, reducing their carbon intensity. However, despite these efficiencies, cloud still has a significant environmental impact. According to the World Bank, in 2022 global cloud processes were estimated to consume 53 TWh of electricity and generated 19 million tons of CO2e Greenhouse gas emissions. That's about the same as the entire total emissions generated by Tanzania in the same period.
While switching to the cloud can offer significant opportunities to reduce costs and emissions, there can be opportunities to improve further by not paying for more cloud than you need. Every cloud decision has an economic cost and an environmental cost. If financial costs are rising, so are the impacts on the planet. Optimizing cloud spend is not choosing between profits and the environment; savings benefit both.
The foremost difficulty organizations have in optimizing their cloud spend is visibility into the problem. You cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Reporting the data is the first step to being able to rationalize your cloud usage. While progress has started to create dashboards tracking the spend on cloud services, visibility for sustainability teams into cloud consumption is still a developing field. But 3 tools stand out as leaders: Cirrus Nexus, Greenpixie and OptiCloud.
Cirrus Nexus extends cloud optimization with real-time carbon intelligence
Cirrus Nexus TrueCarbon helps organizations optimize hybrid and multicloud environments by reducing costs while improving performance and lowering carbon emissions. Extending native cloud tools and leading FinOps platforms, it provides real-time visibility across cloud, AI workloads, data centers and end-user environments.
TrueCarbon identifies optimization opportunities across workload placement, resource utilization, AI workloads, infrastructure efficiency and operational governance, using scenario modelling to balance cost, performance and emissions. Deploying in under 30 minutes, the platform delivers actionable insights within 24 hours, helping organizations improve efficiency, strengthen governance and achieve both financial and sustainability objectives.
Greenpixie provides the PowerBI dashboard of cloud emissions
Greenpixie delivers highly granular, auditable data on cloud and AI usage, breaking down emissions, energy and cost by service, region and resource. With out-of-the-box dashboards and seamless raw data integrations into enterprise workflows, Greenpixie puts trusted data directly in the hands of decision-makers at all levels.
By combining sustainability with cost, security, risk and performance data, Greenpixie enables smarter FinOps and strengthens migration, modernisation and digital transformation planning, embedding energy and carbon considerations right at the architecture stage.
Greenpixie's Training and Certification arm, the GreenOps Academy, has certified over 2,500 IT and Sustainability professionals in cloud and AI GreenOps.
OptiCloud uses AI to power your cloud management
OptiCloud is an AI-powered cloud management platform built on a simple premise: most digital waste is invisible until it costs you. With a significant share of cloud resources unused across most organizations, OptiCloud's platform uses agentic AI to continuously identify and eliminate inefficiencies across AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes, reducing both spend and emissions in a single motion. It's built-in carbon reporting tracks Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in real time, giving sustainability, finance and IT teams a shared view of their environmental and operational footprint. A recipient of the UN COP29 AI for Climate Action Award, OptiCloud is one to watch in the GreenOps space.
WWT provides its clients with cloud carbon reports to begin their journey
Companies face growing pressure to report emissions due to evolving regulations and stakeholder expectations across their supply chains. Using our industry-unique partnerships, WWT and Softchoice are now offering our clients personalized reports that help clients calculate, forecast and monitor their Scope 3 emissions related to the cloud. These can be a great first step for our existing clients before they are ready to implement the platforms described above.
Options during this initial phase of understanding your carbon emissions include native tools, such as the default Carbon Footprint dashboard in Google Cloud Console, as well as third-party solutions like GreenOps reporting in CloudHealth. Some native options (ex. the Azure Carbon Optimization tool) even offer right-sizing recommendations for easy and immediate carbon reduction opportunities. These entry-level tools provide organizations with starting points to identify, track and monitor key carbon-emitting resources before investment in dedicated carbon reporting platforms.
Beyond reporting: take the next step toward sustainable IT
In addition to carbon reports and energy impact assessments, WWT offers a range of services to help organizations advance their sustainability maturity, from reducing data center energy consumption to setting Net Zero targets, building supplier engagement programs and hosting tailored workshops on data analytics and AI.
As the tech industry continues to evolve, WWT and our partners stand at the forefront, making sure that innovation and sustainability go hand in hand. The cloud carbon platforms described above are not just services you engage, they are a step toward a more sustainable and responsible technological future.
Discover how cloud carbon reporting services can transform your organization's approach to IT procurement and contribute to your sustainability goals. Contact us to learn more or get a personalized consultation.