Smarter, greener cloud consumption

Cycloid, the platform engineering company, has unveiled Cloud Carbon Footprint, a new GreenOps tool that accurately displays deployed cloud carbon footprint data alongside cloud costs.

  • Wednesday, 8th February 2023 Posted 1 year ago in by Phil Alsop

Embedded within Cycloid’s FinOps Cloud Cost Management module, Cloud Carbon Footprint has been developed to encourage a culture of sobriety that flows through an organization from the bottom-up, enabling smarter, more environmentally conscious cloud consumption decisions at every level of a business. 

Digital technologies present both an opportunity for a more sustainable world, and a challenge to sustainability. On the one hand, digital transformation increases the efficiency with which we use resources, but the more sophisticated the technology becomes, the more reliant it is on servers, networks and terminals. The direct energy footprint of IT has recently been estimated by The Shift Project to be increasing 9% annually. Combining GreenOps and FinOps approaches, Cloud Carbon Footprint uses sophisticated emissions methodology and publicly available data center information to provide total clarity on an organization’s cloud carbon footprint.

Cloud Carbon Footprint is the only non-optional feature on the Cycloid platform. Updated daily, the tool constructs an accurate picture of an organization’s environmental impact by ingesting and analyzing cloud usage data - including cloud energy conversion, power usage effectiveness, and grid emissions metrics - so that carbon emissions can be tracked over time. This granular emissions data is displayed alongside cloud cost data within the Cycloid Cloud Cost Management module, which can be filtered according to cloud provider, project, region, or tag criteria to empower organizations with the actionable intelligence they need to reduce their cloud carbon emissions. 

“Costs associated with cloud waste or overprovisioning exceeded $26.8 billion in 2022 according to recent research by Gartner. This isn’t just financially inefficient, it’s totally needless from an environmental perspective,” explained Benjamin Brial, founder, Cycloid. “By giving organizations an opportunity to look at real carbon emissions data, our new Cloud Carbon Footprint feature is designed to inspire better, more environmentally-friendly choices at every level of an organization. Only once we understand the role we all have to play in reducing carbon emissions will organizations start to prioritize the more efficient use of resources, and begin their journey towards realizing both their sustainability and IT goals.”

Cycloid is in the process of developing and releasing a comprehensive suite of management tools to help organizations automate and scale their DevOps and hybrid-cloud strategies. In addition to enhancing its platform with features to foster an enriched developer experience that empowers and upskills DevOps teams, the company is dedicated to improving processes with a range of new FinOps and GreenOps capabilities. Available from today, please find more information on Cloud Cost Footprint on the Cycloid website here.