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The cloud world is undeniably moving towards a greener future. The Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report highlights a significant global shift towards more environmentally friendly cloud strategies. While cost optimization remains a top priority, environmental responsibility lends momentum towards reshaping the cloud industry.
The growing focus on cloud sustainability
According to the report, there’s been a significant rise in the number of organizations (36%) that monitor their carbon footprint resulting from cloud usage. Additionally, a further 35% have plans to adopt similar measures within the next two years or later, which is even more encouraging. This means that most companies will soon be watching and controlling the environmental effects of their cloud infrastructure.
Sustainability is becoming more popular, but money still plays a big part in making decisions. Fifty-seven percent of organizations focus on saving money, while 31% focus on both cost and environmental impact. Only 9% place sustainability above cost. The good news? Organizations that think ahead are finding that these goals often match. Strategies that save money, like using resources more fairly and getting rid of waste, also help the environment.
Cloud sustainability isn’t easy—but it’s needed
Cloud sustainability presents unique challenges:
- Getting reliable data to make decisions: Obtaining trusted carbon, water and electricity data for informed workload placement decisions
- Understanding cost-carbon tradeoffs: Combining sustainability and cost data to make carbon-aware decisions while prioritizing cost
- Compliance: Helping companies follow environmental, social and governance (ESG) rules like CSRD and CSDDD, and meeting internal goals to reduce emissions
To start the process, you must:
- Gather, ingest, integrate and contextualize data from hybrid and multi-cloud sources through a common bill processing system
- Marry billing data with sustainability-enriched, auditable data covering everything from location-specific PUE metrics and chipset power performance to data center level water usage to hourly carbon intensity metrics
- Further enrich the data with usage data related to Units of Measure (UOM) and Reserved Instances (RI)
How Flexera’s Cloud Sustainability add-on meets the challenge
As sustainability rules get stricter and businesses focus on ESG projects, Flexera Cloud Sustainability is ready to handle the many challenges above.
We use Technopedia, the most trusted and comprehensive source of hardware, software, SaaS and cloud product information in the world. It gives you detailed information that connects your FinOps solutions with sustainability goals across hybrid IT environments. And Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization provides billing ingest and more across multi-cloud environments.
A high-level architectural diagram of how Flexera Cloud Sustainability works
With these capabilities, Cloud Sustainability enables you to measure, track and optimize your carbon footprint, integrating sustainability metrics with cost management. This is crucial if you’re prioritizing both financial and environmental considerations. If you’re already tracking your cloud carbon footprint or planning to do so soon, Cloud Sustainability provides the trusted data, transparency and insights you need to move from essential measurement to sophisticated sustainability management.
Drive smarter FinOps through Cloud Sustainability
The overlapping activities of FinOps and Cloud Sustainability
Cloud cost optimization is easier with a holistic view across multiple dimensions and activities. And with Cloud Sustainability, it’s easier to mature your FinOps practice and align activities with the three FinOps Foundation Framework phases: Inform, Optimize and Operate.
- Inform: Get visibility into how cloud resource usage, cost and carbon emissions (CO2e) intersect
- Optimize: Eliminate resource waste and reduce overprovisioning to lower carbon emissions and costs
- Operate: Leverage policies/automation to support both green software development and cost efficiency
Flexera’s Cloud Sustainability add-on lets you:
- See total carbon emissions, water and electricity consumption
- View breakdowns of emissions by geographical region, cloud provider and resource subcategory
- Track CO2e and cloud spend over time
Certified data for auditable, compliant Cloud Sustainability
Flexera One Cloud Sustainability is the only platform solution with ISO 14064-certified data for Greenhouse Gas Protocol reporting through our partner, Greenpixie. This enables you to meet regulatory requirements while simultaneously optimizing cloud usage and cost.
Flexera One Cloud Sustainability is the only platform solution with ISO-14064-certified data for Greenhouse Gas Protocol reporting through our partner, Greenpixie
Our unique capabilities for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments provide:
- Carbon footprint visibility: A multi-cloud dashboard offers resource-level visibility into key metrics
- Actionable recommendations: Data-driven insights simultaneously reduce carbon emissions and optimize cloud costs through rightsizing, scheduling and strategic workload placement
- Regulatory reporting and audit readiness: Customizable reports align with sustainability frameworks for simplified compliance and internal communications
- Impact visibility: View the impact of recommendations on both cost and carbon
Cloud Sustainability: A must-have
Sustainability in the cloud is no longer seen as an optional feature, but rather a necessary component for organizations. As regulators push for more environmentally-friendly practices and stakeholders demand higher standards, sustainability measures are becoming just as important as financial ones in managing cloud operations.
Flexera’s Cloud Sustainability add-on makes it easier than ever to stay ahead. It helps you cut your environmental footprint while boosting efficiency, building trust and remaining compliant.
