What is GreenOps? Approach Towards Sustainable IT & Cloud

Regarding the 2025 digital transformation landscape, sustainability and transparency are no longer separate entities. Organisations nowadays are expected to innovate but, responsibly. The demand for cloud services, data processing, and digital services grows exponentially, so there is a need to manage the digital footprint.

Here enters GreenOps, a practice established to integrate sustainability in everyday IT and cloud operations. As more businesses adopt this shift, Greenops is reshaping how we view businesses and think about technology, infrastructure, and climate change.

What is GreenOps?

GreenOps, short for “Green Operations,” is a practice to reduce the environmental impact of IT operations, especially within a cloud computing environment. When we talk about GreenOps, particularly, we have to answer these questions:

1. How can we reduce the carbon footprint of our digital infrastructure?
2. How efficiently are we using our digital services?
3. Can we align our IT operations with the sustainability goals?
4. What tools and strategies can we use to make our cloud workload environment-friendly?

Answering these questions will allow organisations to approach operational efficiency with dual benefits—cost-effectiveness and climate responsibility.

Why is GreenOps Beneficial in 2025?

1. Climate change is enhancing business risks.

The growing climate crisis has placed sustainability at the forefront of global policy and corporate strategy. Governments are encouraging policies to tighten the regulations on carbon reporting, investors, and prioritising ESG(Environmental, social, and governance) metrics, and consumers are asking for more eco-conscious practices.
A survey in 2025 found that more than 85% of CEOS indicated that sustainability is related to long-term value creation. Failing to reduce environmental impact is no longer an ethical lapse; rather, it is now a reputational issue.

2. Cloud Infrastructure is a major contributor to emissions.

A recent report found that cloud computing is one of the major contributors to emissions in the tech industry. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres and data transmission networks account for 1% of the CO2 emissions worldwide, which is itself a staggering figure.

Additionally, 30% of the Cloud services investment goes wasted due to a lack of infrastructure, poor planning, capacity planning, or any other issue. greenOps helps reduce this impact and make our cloud infrastructure more environmentally friendly.

How does GreenOps work?

GreenOps is not a tool but rather a way of doing things. For instance, we follow Scrum for project management. Similarly, we must utilise Greenops for better optimisation and continuous improvement. Let’s discuss the principles that are utilised to implement GreenOps:

1. Measurement and Visibility

The first step is to measure the environmental impact of your digital operations. This step can comprise tracking energy usage, server utilisation, and emissions from cloud consumption.
The big cloud providers we know have built-in tools to track and report the carbon footprint. Some of them are:

• AWS customer carbon footprint tool
• Microsoft Emission Impact Dashboard
• Google Cloud Carbon Footprint

These dedicated dashboards help businesses track carbon emissions per region, usage, and account, offering better opportunities for decision-making to sustain the impact.

2. Resource optimisation

Now that we are fully aware of the impact of our digital services, it is time to manage our resources mindfully. GreenOps will help to figure out and eliminate the following:

• Ideal and unlimited virtual machines
• Redundant storage or data transfers
• Inefficient compute instances
• Over-provisioned environment

By removing ideal resources and optimising what is available, we can eliminate energy consumption by 40-60%. This reduces the environmental impact and cloud costs.

3. Schedule work when it is cleaner

GreenOps encourages carbon-aware scheduling, which translates to running heavy computing tasks when energy is the cleanest. The electorate, for example, shows how electricity produced by some resources like solar and wind is cleaner than fossil fuels. In 2025, we can also expect Google to launch a feature that automatically schedules tasks based on load and real-time carbon data in different regions.

4. Encourage developers to participate more.

GreenOps is not only about the infrastructure and servers. The software built is equally essential. We must encourage the developer to:

• Write codes that run efficiently
• Use lightweight tools
• Minimise unnecessary operations, such as API calls and redundant data fetching.

It is high time that teams were trained to write “green” code for a better future.

Real-world Examples of GreenOps

• SAP: Successfully reduced cloud emissions by 30% by cleaning up the unused system and using smart scheduling.
• FedAx: utilising AI to reduce emissions by 22% without slowing down anyrations.
• Ubisoft: In gaming, they use auto-scaling, which reduces emissions by 35% during peak hours.

Trends to look out for in 2025

1. Sustainability in vendor contracts

• Many companies are asking their vendors to:
• Report emission data
• Commit to using renewable energy
• Provide transparency in environmental impact

42% of the 500 Fortune companies are now adding these clauses in their contracts, which will also promote sustainability in IT.

2. Utilising AI tools for optimisation

AI tools are utilised and will continue to be used in:

• Predict peak usage times
• Adjust workloads to reduce energy use
• Balance performance with emission goals

3. Developer tools for tracking emissions

Developers can also use various tools to analyse carbon emissions and, therefore, take measures to reduce them. Some of the tools that can be used are:

• Cloud carbon footprint
• Kepler
• Scaphandre

Moreover, other predictions that we can make as per the usage and future innovations are:

• Cloud pricing that will be changing based on carbon intensity
• Marketplaces to buy carbon offsets automatically
• Self-adjusting and self-sustaining IT infrastructures to reduce the emission
• New job roles might emerge, such as Green Architects and Sustainability Engineers.

Final Word

GreenOps is not merely a trend; it is a necessary shift that we must make to choose a better life. It is high time that we learn how to use technology in a world where resources are replenishing. Moreover, GreenOps offers many other benefits, such as cost savings, regulatory compliance, building customer trust, system efficiency, and promoting a culture of innovation.
The future of IT is not just AI-driven or Cloud-driven; it is sustainability-driven, which is only possible because of GreenOps.