What is sustainable IT?
Sustainable IT is the practice of reducing the environmental impact of all the technology an organisation uses, from laptops to data centres.
Why it matters
Sustainable IT, also called green IT, covers the energy use, carbon emissions, water use and hardware footprint of an organisation's technology. That includes end-user devices, on-premises servers, networks, cloud services and AI. Hardware counts as well as electricity, because making servers and devices carries its own emissions before they are switched on.
Cloud and AI are the fastest-growing part of most IT estates and among the hardest to measure. The hardware sits in a provider's data centre, a cloud bill has millions of line items, and each provider's own carbon tool uses its own method. GreenOps is the part of sustainable IT that deals with cloud and AI.
An example
An organisation can meter the power drawn by its own server room and count the laptops it buys each year. Its cloud estate needs a different approach, because it never sees those servers. Cloud figures have to be estimated from billing data, published hardware specifications, and published grid and data centre figures.
Where Greenpixie fits
Greenpixie covers the cloud and AI part of a sustainable IT programme:
- public cloud usage on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
- compute, memory, storage and networking services
- AI inference across over 500 models
- energy, water, and Scope 2 and Scope 3 carbon for each unit of usage
On-premises infrastructure, private clouds outside the three providers and end-user devices are outside its scope, so a full programme needs other data alongside it. Greenpixie data lands in tools teams already use, such as FinOps platforms or a data warehouse.