Why GreenOps will succeed where FinOps is failing

Global IT spending is expected to soar in 2025, gaining 9% according to recent estimates. This surge is driven by the rapid expansion of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, both of which are reshaping industries and enabling unprecedented scalability and innovation. The implications for cloud adoption are profound, as businesses increasingly rely on these technologies to drive digital transformation, optimize operations and gain competitive advantages. However, the rapid pace of growth also highlights the urgent need for more sustainable and efficient resource management practices.  

For individual companies, public cloud spending has skyrocketed in recent years, often exceeding the expectations of initial cloud business cases, and frequently accelerating faster than controls can be implemented. On average, financial services clients we’ve worked with on cloud migration have had cloud bills 2-3 times the original expectations. Capital One built Cloud Custodian initially to address the issue of dev/test systems left running with little utilization.  

The rapid adoption of AI is making the challenge an order of magnitude worse. Many organizations have turned to FinOps practices to regain control over these escalating costs. However, without a significant commitment from architects and engineers to design more efficient systems, shut down or resize underutilized resources, deploy autoscaling or adopt other cost optimization methods, many efforts fail to achieve meaningful impact. A fundamental change in approach is urgently needed. 

Why FinOps is failing  

FinOps — a framework formed by combining Finance and DevOps — was introduced in the early 2010s as cloud adoption surged, addressing financial accountability and cost optimization in the cloud. While its potential is significant, FinOps often struggles to deliver on its promises. Here are the key reasons:  

• Lack of cross-functional alignment. FinOps primarily involves finance and IT teams, often neglecting input from other stakeholders like operations and sustainability teams. This siloed approach leads to suboptimal decision-making and fractured strategies. We had operational teams at clients resist doing the effort for regular Chargeback/Showback reporting to development teams, only to end up with a scramble to determine the cause of spiking bills. 
• Short-term focus. By emphasizing immediate cost-cutting, FinOps often encourages behaviors that compromise long-term goals such as performance, availability, scalability and sustainability. We’ve worked with multiple clients who have insisted on cross-region, active-active disaster recovery implementations, only to pull back when faced with the cost. The result was a compromised availability architecture. A more sustainable design pattern of pilot-light or launch-on-failover would deliver both availability and cost optimization but will require greater design and implementation effort. Architects must combine functional requirements with multiple other long-term requirements to build sustainable systems. 
• Overemphasis on tools, budgets and controls. FinOps initiatives often prioritize implementing cost-management tools over cultivating a culture of accountability and collaboration, which is essential for lasting change. 
• Neglecting motivation. The cost-control focus fails to engage architects and engineers in rethinking how systems are designed, built and operated for greater efficiency. This lack of engagement results in inertia and minimal progress. For example, the database team we worked with in an organization new to the cloud launched all the AWS RDS database servers from dev through production, incurring a $600K a month cloud bill nine months before the scheduled production launch. The overburdened team was not thinking about optimizing costs, but rather optimizing their own time and getting out of the way of the migration team as quickly as possible. 
• Environmental oversight: FinOps focuses almost exclusively on financial metrics, sidelining environmental considerations, which are becoming increasingly critical for modern organizations.  

Driving optimization and efficiency using FinOps fails not due to insufficient tools, processes or controls, but because it does not motivate architects and engineers to embrace the necessary work. A more compelling driver — like addressing climate change — is needed. A personal commitment to sustainability is shown in recent studies to be a much higher motivator than cost. 

The rise of GreenOps  

GreenOps — formed by merging FinOps, sustainability and DevOps — addresses the limitations of FinOps while integrating sustainability as a core principle. Green computing contributes to GreenOps by emphasizing energy-efficient design, resource optimization and the use of sustainable technologies and platforms. This foundational focus ensures that every system built under GreenOps principles is not only cost-effective but also minimizes its environmental footprint, aligning technological innovation with ecological responsibility. 

Moreover, we’ve found that providing emissions feedback to architects and engineers is a bigger motivator than cost to inspire them to design more efficient systems and build automation to shut down underutilized resources. For the same reasons we all separate our recycling from our trash, engineers, particularly Millennials and Gen-Z, buy into the cultural transformation of GreenOps.  

It shifts the focus to environmental impact, creating a dual emphasis on cost-efficiency and ecological responsibility. Here’s why GreenOps is set to succeed where FinOps alone cannot:  

• Holistic approach. GreenOps incorporates financial, environmental and operational metrics, ensuring a balanced strategy that aligns with broader organizational goals.  
• Cross-functional collaboration. By involving stakeholders from IT, finance, operations and sustainability teams, GreenOps fosters comprehensive decision-making and better alignment.  
• Standardized metrics. Leveraging frameworks for carbon accounting and energy efficiency simplifies benchmarking and decision-making. Making emissions estimations visible to architects and engineers, such as the metrics based on the Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity, along with green systems design training gives them the tools to make sustainability optimizations early in the design process.  
• Long-term value creation. GreenOps promotes practices that deliver both cost savings and sustainability benefits, aligning with corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals and enhancing brand value.  
• Cultural shift. GreenOps emphasizes building a culture of environmental accountability, inspiring behavioral changes that support sustainable cloud practices.  

However, GreenOps alone is not enough to address the scale of inefficiency and the rapid growth in costs and energy consumption. Sustainability needs to be brought into the earliest stages of design or vendor selection. A broader framework is required to drive transformative change. 

The role of enterprise architecture and transformational leadership in sustainability  

Enterprise architecture is a framework to drive the transformation necessary for organizations to remain agile and resilient amid rapid technological and environmental changes. By integrating Green computing and GreenOps principles, enterprise architecture ensures that sustainability considerations are embedded at every stage of system design and operations. This alignment enables organizations to build and operate sustainable architectures that optimize energy usage, reduce waste and achieve long-term sustainability goals alongside technical and business objectives. The synergy between these approaches promotes a unified strategy, bridging the gap between operational efficiency and environmental responsibility.  

But technical skills alone are insufficient for meaningful transformation — strong leadership and the ability to inspire are equally vital. In working with clients implementing enterprise architecture governance efforts, we’ve seen over and over that architects, engineers and operations teams may grudgingly follow rules and directives, but true transformation requires enthusiastic buy-in. 

This is where the principles of transformational leadership come into play. We found that by focusing on the cultural aspects of cloud adoption with clients — including working with engineers to ensure their interests in learning DevOps, agile, infrastructure-as-code and cloud-native design — cloud journeys were faster, smoother and cheaper. This kind of leadership approach, rooted in both the psychological and the logical, guides organizations through cultural shifts to build highly efficient, sustainable systems. 

The foundational components of transformational leadership include:  

1. Inspirational motivation. Leaders articulate a clear, compelling vision that inspires employees to exceed expectations and embrace new challenges.  

2. Intellectual stimulation. Leaders encourage questioning assumptions, exploring innovative ideas and pursuing groundbreaking solutions.  

3. Individualized consideration. Leaders provide tailored support and mentoring, understanding and addressing the unique needs of their employees.  

4. Idealized influence. Leaders act as role models, embodying the organization’s values and demonstrating unwavering commitment to its goals.  

By integrating these principles with the motivation of sustainability for GreenOps and sustainable architectures, technology leaders can drive the cultural and operational transformation needed to build and operate efficient, sustainable systems. 

Challenges and opportunities  

While GreenOps and sustainable architectures are appealing frameworks, adopting sustainable technology practices comes with challenges:  

• Initial investment. Implementing GreenOps and sustainable architectures requires significant upfront costs for tools, training and process changes.
• Complex sustainable architecture patterns. Designing highly efficient, dynamic architectures to optimize sustainability is a complex process and a new skill set for most architects.  
• Multiple metrics. Measuring environmental impact alongside financial performance can be daunting but is essential for meaningful progress. 
• Organizational resistance. Shifting to a GreenOps/sustainability mindset requires overcoming resistance to change and ingrained practices.  

Despite these obstacles, the opportunities are immense, and the work does not have to be onerous. For example, recent work by the University of Waterloo demonstrated that a small change in the Linux kernel could reduce data center power by as much as 30%. 

With focus and feedback, organizations we work with are finding many other opportunities to optimize their workloads. Companies that adopt GreenOps can achieve competitive advantages through enhanced sustainability credentials, cost savings and improved stakeholder alignment. Beyond financial benefits, GreenOps empowers organizations to contribute to global sustainability efforts, making them more attractive to environmentally conscious customers, employees and investors. 

The next frontier in cloud operations 

Combining GreenOps, sustainable architectures and technology transformational leadership represents the next frontier in cloud operations, addressing FinOps’ limitations by integrating sustainability into the equation. Organizations should begin by aligning their operational and sustainability goals, investing in training to build expertise in sustainable design and fostering collaboration across all departments. This proactive approach not only ensures a more efficient and eco-friendly cloud ecosystem but also positions businesses as leaders in the pursuit of technological and environmental excellence. 

By combining a culture of collaboration, transparency and long-term value creation with the principles of transformational leadership, GreenOps offers a pathway to more sustainable and efficient cloud practices. As businesses prioritize environmental responsibility, GreenOps is poised to become a critical framework, shaping the future of cloud computing and ensuring a harmonious balance between technological innovation and ecological stewardship.  

Kacy Clarke has held executive roles at Microsoft, Deloitte, Cloud Technology Partners/HPE, DTCC and Wellington Management where she has driven technology innovation and transformation initiatives guiding organizations through complex IT and business challenges. Kacy is currently the Chief Technology Officer for Chiefly & Co, a management consulting firm helping clients achieve both sustainability and profitability. She is an IASA Global Chief Architect, and is the co-founder of the SustainableArchitectures.org community, which is bringing together IT architects to establish principles, patterns, frameworks and guidelines for technology leaders responsible for ensuring organizational ESG and Sustainability business goals are met. She is also a sustainability advisor in the Responsible AI initiative at SustainableIT.org.  

This article was made possible by our partnership with the IASA Chief Architect Forum. The CAF’s purpose is to test, challenge and support the art and science of Business Technology Architecture and its evolution over time as well as grow the influence and leadership of chief architects both inside and outside the profession. The CAF is a leadership community of the IASA, the leading non-profit professional association for business technology architects.