FinOpsPod Voicemail: Cloud Sustainability

Joe: 00:00:15

Believe it or not.

Joe: 00:00:17

FinOpsPod isn't at home.

Joe: 00:00:19

So leave a message at the beep.

Joe: 00:00:22

We must be out or else we'd pick up the phone.

Joe: 00:00:26

Where could we be.

Joe: 00:00:29

Believe it or not, we're not home.

Prabha: 00:00:34

Hello Joe this is Prabha I work with Nestle Australia as a FinOps

Prabha: 00:00:39

specialist, supporting my end users and customers in the Asia Pacific region,

Prabha: 00:00:44

providing them visibility about their cloud expenses and advising them in

Prabha: 00:00:49

avoiding and optimizing their cloud spend.

Prabha: 00:00:52

I'm a big fan of FinOpsPod And I make it a practice to listen to all of your

Prabha: 00:00:57

podcasts, to gain some fresh new insights.

Prabha: 00:01:00

I haven't missed any of your podcasts so far.

Prabha: 00:01:04

My question to you, or rather to the FinOps community here is about

Prabha: 00:01:09

a topic which is tightly integrated with FinOps any guesses there.

Prabha: 00:01:15

You may be right.

Prabha: 00:01:17

I wanted to ask a question about greenops We know that the top three

Prabha: 00:01:21

cloud vendors provide carbon emissions data in some form or the other, but

Prabha: 00:01:27

what is driving organizations who are running workloads on the cloud to act

Prabha: 00:01:32

on this data and how are they getting started to reduce their carbon footprint?

Joe: 00:01:48

Hey there FinOptinauts!

Joe: 00:01:49

This is Joe, and welcome to a special edition of answering

Joe: 00:01:54

the FinOpsPod Voicemail.

Joe: 00:01:57

Thank you to Prabha for this fantastic question on GreenOps.

Joe: 00:02:01

There is a whole lot of talk about GreenOps and sustainability and the Venn

Joe: 00:02:06

diagram between GreenOps and FinOps is almost completely overlapping each other.

Joe: 00:02:12

It's just so much similarities between the two.

Joe: 00:02:15

If you're doing FinOps you're likely doing the same work you would be doing

Joe: 00:02:20

if you thought you were doing GreenOps.

Joe: 00:02:22

It's something that's coming for everyone.

Joe: 00:02:23

There are some people who've been working on sustainability and

Joe: 00:02:26

GreenOps for a year or two now.

Joe: 00:02:27

And there are a whole lot of folks just like me who are just starting to learn a

Joe: 00:02:32

little bit more and get more engaged in the sustainability side of cloud spend.

Joe: 00:02:38

To help answer province question.

Joe: 00:02:40

I brought in mark butcher, who leads up the FinOps Foundation

Joe: 00:02:43

Sustainability Working Group.

Joe: 00:02:45

That group is filled with so many fantastic people.

Joe: 00:02:48

They meet weekly and they've helped educate me on a lot

Joe: 00:02:51

of what GreenOps is about.

Joe: 00:02:53

So here's Mark to help answer why and how companies are getting

Joe: 00:02:58

started with sustainability

Mark: 00:03:02

Hi, Joe, Mark Butcher here from Positiv in the UK.

Mark: 00:03:04

Thanks for passing across this great question from Prabha

Mark: 00:03:07

at Nestle about GreenOps.

Mark: 00:03:09

For those who don't know at Positiv, a lot of our work these

Mark: 00:03:12

days is on digital sustainability.

Mark: 00:03:14

And I'm also, from a Foundation perspective, one of the lucky people

Mark: 00:03:18

helping to lead the sustainability working group inside the Foundation,

Mark: 00:03:22

Prabha's question about GreenOps and what's driving organizations to act

Mark: 00:03:26

on cloud carbon data, and how are they're getting started, kind of sums

Mark: 00:03:29

up the reasons why we decided to set up the working group in the first place.

Mark: 00:03:33

So there's no single reason why organizations are finally deciding to act

Mark: 00:03:38

on the carbon emissions data that's being shared by the cloud vendors, but there

Mark: 00:03:41

are some common things that influence the behavior of consumers, large and small.

Mark: 00:03:46

Four of them in total.

Mark: 00:03:47

So firstly, there's a rising level of pressure being applied externally

Mark: 00:03:52

by investors and shareholders with CEOs and board level people finally

Mark: 00:03:56

being held accountable for their organizations overall emissions.

Mark: 00:04:00

One of the real reasons for this is that green or environmentally

Mark: 00:04:03

friendly companies demonstrate really generating significantly higher

Mark: 00:04:07

stock returns compared to their less environmentally focused peers.

Mark: 00:04:10

And this has been measured by some of the biggest VCs over recent years where

Mark: 00:04:13

they're getting a much higher return.

Mark: 00:04:15

Secondly, governments and regulatory bodies are showing teeth and they

Mark: 00:04:18

finally creating or tightening environmental legislation, and

Mark: 00:04:22

reporting requirements, meaning that companies are finding it much harder

Mark: 00:04:26

to avoid addressing the impact their organizations have on the environment.

Mark: 00:04:29

So there's kind of hopefully going to be a lot less greenwashing in the

Mark: 00:04:32

future, and a lot more focused on action.

Mark: 00:04:35

And thirdly, and this is a big one, customers, particularly the younger

Mark: 00:04:38

generation, are making their buying decisions on ethical grounds so that

Mark: 00:04:42

they're preferring to buy from brands that they perceive to care about the

Mark: 00:04:46

environment and other related issues.

Mark: 00:04:48

And finally, and very importantly, there is the impact of employee

Mark: 00:04:52

pressure from inside the organization.

Mark: 00:04:54

In a world gripped by what's known as a great resignation.

Mark: 00:04:57

There's a real shortage of skilled, resources.

Mark: 00:05:00

There's more jobs than there are people to fill them.

Mark: 00:05:03

And employees are placing a huge importance on how their prospective

Mark: 00:05:07

employers are addressing sustainability when selecting their next roles.

Mark: 00:05:11

So as an organization, if you want to be finding the right level of people to fill

Mark: 00:05:14

the gaps that you've got, you don't want to be fishing in a very small pool do you?

Mark: 00:05:18

Combine all these points together, sustainability is suddenly really

Mark: 00:05:21

high on the agenda in most.

Mark: 00:05:23

And without being too flippant, nothing motivates the C-suite more than something

Mark: 00:05:26

that potentially impacts their bonuses.

Mark: 00:05:29

And it's great as an impact of this, to see pressure finally being applied

Mark: 00:05:32

downwards, right from the top with aggressive net, zero targets being set

Mark: 00:05:36

and action finally being taken, because what this means is that there's one

Mark: 00:05:40

critical thing being made available and that's budget and possibly also time.

Mark: 00:05:44

But, and there is a big but, the problem inside the day, Is that carbon

Mark: 00:05:49

emissions in our world is a bit of a murky place with accurate calculations

Mark: 00:05:54

being really hard to pull together.

Mark: 00:05:56

And there's a sad lack of availability of detailed analytics and a lot of the

Mark: 00:06:00

tooling vendors haven't really yet stepped up to understand this, but despite it

Mark: 00:06:04

being difficult, it's not impossible.

Mark: 00:06:06

And there's some simple points you can start with, particularly

Mark: 00:06:09

if you accept the current limitations and work around them.

Mark: 00:06:11

From a cloud perspective, it's key to understand that the data

Mark: 00:06:15

coming from the cloud providers isn't massively consistent.

Mark: 00:06:18

And for the two out of the three top providers, it only addresses a small

Mark: 00:06:21

proportion of their overall emissions.

Mark: 00:06:24

Covering a little bit of their scope one and two, and totally ignoring

Mark: 00:06:27

their scope three and most don't cover all of their cloud services.

Mark: 00:06:31

They only cover a subset to them.

Mark: 00:06:33

So despite emissions calculations from the vendors being a little

Mark: 00:06:36

flaky, there are still some practical, easy steps that you can take.

Mark: 00:06:39

And the FinOps practitioners are massively ideally positioned to

Mark: 00:06:43

help drive the reduction in cloud carbon footprint in their companies.

Mark: 00:06:47

So Prabha asks where people are getting started.

Mark: 00:06:49

Now, this is a really complicated question and probably needs a complete

Mark: 00:06:52

podcast of his own to do it justice.

Mark: 00:06:54

But at high level getting started with reducing cloud carbon footprint,

Mark: 00:07:00

follows the principles of FinOps.

Mark: 00:07:01

GreenOps is very, very well aligned with the world of FinOps and it gives the

Mark: 00:07:06

opportunity to engage across your business talking about more than dollars, because

Mark: 00:07:09

what you'll find is that actually people outside of the world of cloud, they do

Mark: 00:07:14

care quite a lot about sustainability and they want to make a positive impact.

Mark: 00:07:17

So this includes working with your line of business teams to help them

Mark: 00:07:20

understand the impact their decisions have on the carbon footprint.

Mark: 00:07:23

But before you do anything, I would recommend building

Mark: 00:07:26

a benchmark of your current.

Mark: 00:07:27

footprint and documenting any assumptions you're making and making sure that,

Mark: 00:07:31

you know and can articulate back inside your business, any major gaps or kind

Mark: 00:07:35

of calculation assumptions you've used.

Mark: 00:07:38

And it's also important to involve your wider IT organization in the form of

Mark: 00:07:41

possibly a steering group outside of just the FinOps function, helping to create

Mark: 00:07:45

a culture of sustainability, where you actually have accountability, where people

Mark: 00:07:49

are responsible for their actions and they understand the impact of what they're

Mark: 00:07:52

doing on their overall carbon footprint.

Mark: 00:07:55

Once you've got the baseline and you've got this wider group of

Mark: 00:07:57

stakeholders, then you can start finding areas where you can make savings.

Mark: 00:08:00

So assessing any carbon hotspots that you've got and building a program of

Mark: 00:08:03

remediation work and a roadmap to make and critical document any improvements.

Mark: 00:08:08

There's obviously a lot more to this.

Mark: 00:08:10

And if you want to find out more, it's a bit of a sales pitch here, but join our

Mark: 00:08:13

working group because we're always looking for people to contribute and help out.

Mark: 00:08:16

So thanks for that question, Joe.

Mark: 00:08:17

Hopefully I answered it and bye for now.

Joe: 00:08:24

There you have it.

Joe: 00:08:25

A short and sweet introduction to sustainability and GreenOps.

Joe: 00:08:30

Obviously there's much more to GreenOps than just this short podcast.

Joe: 00:08:34

So why don't you join the FinOps Foundation Sustainability Working Group

Joe: 00:08:39

and help drive the content and education of this incredibly important area further.

Joe: 00:08:46

We're an open source community folks.

Joe: 00:08:48

You help develop the content and we help spread it across the world.

Joe: 00:08:54

Thank you so much to Mark Butcher and Prabha Palanivelu for a fantastic

Joe: 00:09:00

question that got us all started.

Joe: 00:09:03

If you want to leave FinOpsPod a voicemail, click

Joe: 00:09:06

the link in the show notes.

Joe: 00:09:08

Who knows?

Joe: 00:09:08

Maybe next time I'm running late on a deadline, I'll grab your voicemail

Joe: 00:09:13

and make a whole podcast out of it.

Joe: 00:09:16

That's all for now see you next time on FinOpsPod.