GreenOps: sustainability comes to digital technology

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that global electricity consumption by data centers could double to reach approximately 945 TWh by 2030, driven by growing demand for digital services. This increase puts pressure on power grids, cooling systems, resource use, and the replacement of technological equipment. In this context, GreenOps is gaining prominence—a concept that proposes moving toward a more responsible, measurable, and efficient use of digital technology.

In this article, Saima Systems explains what GreenOps is, why this approach is gaining importance amid the growth of cloud services, AI, and data centers, and how it can help companies better measure, optimize, and manage their digital consumption. It also analyzes the role that network infrastructure can play and how solutions such as SAIWALL Secure SD-WAN can provide visibility, control, and operational efficiency in distributed organizations.

GreenOps can be defined as a management discipline aimed at incorporating sustainability criteria into the use of digital resources. Its goal is to measure, optimize, and reduce technology’s environmental footprint without compromising innovation, security, availability, or service performance.

It is a way to use technology more effectively. Its premise is simple: any digital resource consumed unnecessarily generates costs, complexity, and environmental impact. This discipline helps companies answer three questions:

• What digital resources are we consuming?
• What economic and environmental impact does that consumption have?
• What real value does it bring to the organization?

The concept is closely related to FinOps, which aims to optimize the cost and value of cloud usage.

• FinOps asks how much a digital workload costs and what return it provides.
• GreenOps adds another dimension: what environmental impact it generates and how that impact can be reduced through more efficient use of infrastructure, software, data, and cloud services.

FinOps, in turn, draws on the DevOps culture. Just as DevOps transformed software development by breaking down the silos between development and operations teams to gain agility, FinOps applies that same logic of collaboration, this time between technology, finance, and business, to manage cloud spending collaboratively. GreenOps continues this same cultural evolution: it extends collaboration across teams to also incorporate sustainability as a shared responsibility, rather than one solely belonging to IT.

Digital sustainability is becoming increasingly urgent due to the convergence of four factors documented by organizations and reference frameworks such as the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, the FinOps Foundation, the Green Software Foundation, and industry associations such as Spain DC.

These factors are:

1. The growth of Data Centers

This model offers flexibility, but it can also lead to oversized resources, duplicate workloads, unnecessary storage, and a lack of visibility into actual consumption.

For example: in Spain, the installed IT power capacity in commercial data centers reached 439 MW by the end of 2025, representing a 24% increase compared to 2024, according to Spain DC. If this trend continues, by 2030 the market’s current scale could increase sixfold.

2. The expansion of AI

Generative AI has accelerated the demand for processing power, storage, inference, and data transfer. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), electricity consumption by data centers will grow by about 15% annually between 2024 and 2030—more than four times the rate of growth in electricity consumption in other sectors.

3. Regulatory and reputational pressure

The European Union has already introduced reporting requirements for data centers with a power demand exceeding 500 kW under the Energy Efficiency Directive. In addition, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364 establishes harmonized reporting requirements and a first phase of a European sustainability rating system for this sector.

4. The economic factor

Reducing the digital footprint also involves better controlling technology spending, avoiding operational inefficiencies, and improving infrastructure planning. In increasingly complex cloud environments, sustainability and economic efficiency tend to go hand in hand.

GreenOps isn’t suggesting we innovate less. It’s suggesting we stop innovating in ways that waste resources. This involves reviewing decisions that often go unnoticed: cloud environments that remain active even though they are no longer in use, duplicate data, historical storage without a retention policy, workloads running at inefficient times, oversized applications, unnecessary traffic between locations and clouds, or the indiscriminate use of AI tools for tasks that do not require that level of computational power.

The Green Software Foundation summarizes the approach to sustainable software in three main areas:

• Energy efficiency
• Carbon awareness
• Hardware efficiency

In other words, designing and operating software to consume less energy, running workloads while taking into account the carbon intensity of the available electricity, and making better use of equipment for longer periods of time. The key is to shift from a culture of unlimited availability to a culture of responsible use.

GreenOps draws on elements of FinOps, sustainable software, and new energy transparency frameworks: measuring consumption, optimizing workloads and resources, and governing technology decisions based on criteria such as cost, value, performance, and environmental impact.

1. The first step is to measure

The company needs to know what digital resources it consumes, where they are located, who uses them, how often, what costs they generate, and what emissions may be associated with that use. Without measurement, digital sustainability remains merely an intention.

2. The second step is to optimize

This includes adjusting cloud capacity. To do this, it is necessary to eliminate inactive resources, review storage policies, reduce redundancies, and schedule intensive workloads during times or in regions with lower carbon intensity.

3. The third step is governance

GreenOps must be integrated into decisions regarding architecture, technology procurement, software development, the cloud, AI, cybersecurity, business continuity, and operations.

4. The fourth step: value criteria

The question is, “What value does this consumption provide?” GreenOps does not seek to eliminate technology consumption, but rather to reduce consumption that does not add value.

AI deserves specific attention within GreenOps. The risk is not AI itself. The risk lies in implementing artificial intelligence without usage criteria, data governance, access controls, workload assessment, or value analysis. Digital sustainability, in this sense, is directly linked to technological maturity. The more organized the data, applications, access, and infrastructure are, the easier it will be to innovate with less friction, lower costs, and a smaller environmental impact.

Network infrastructure alone does not solve an organization’s digital carbon footprint. Most of the GreenOps debate focuses on the cloud, data centers, software, storage, data, and AI. However, in distributed enterprises, the network can indeed contribute to more efficient digital management.

A network without visibility can hide inefficiencies: unnecessary traffic, undersized connections, inefficient routes, non-critical applications that consume resources, duplicate services, or dependencies that force organizations to oversize their connectivity. A governable network infrastructure allows organizations to monitor, segment, prioritize, and optimize traffic.

In multi-site environments, a solution like SAIWALL Secure SD-WAN can provide centralized visibility, application control, prioritization of critical services, segmentation, continuity, and more flexible connectivity management.

GreenOps is about measuring, consuming, operating, and governing digital technology more effectively. Because the next stage of transformation will depend not only on doing more with technology, but on doing it more efficiently, securely, and responsibly.