Reducing IT costs and emissions with FinOps and GreenOps

The increasing use of cloud services comes with many benefits and risks. Cost control is usually only discussed at a late stage. Easily accessible cloud services are a temptation to expand computing and storage capacity in an uncontrolled and hasty manner. Resources are wasted. Unnecessary costs and emissions are generated. The monitoring of IT costs is undergoing a paradigm shift due to the cloud. Costs arise in real time and in a decentralised manner. They need to be managed differently, otherwise they will increase exponentially.

This challenge has given rise to "FinOps". FinOps is a framework and a practice that focuses on all approaches that enable practical cloud cost management and optimise costs.

Some of the FinOps practices have a resource-saving effect and therefore reduce both costs and emissions. These are an essential part of the practices that are usually summarised under the term "GreenOps". It is possible and necessary to transfer these cloud-focused approaches to the local data centre if the entire IT system is to act in a resource-saving manner in order to reduce IT costs and emissions.