GreenOps & FinOps – Sweep: From compliance & cost cutting to business growth
This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Yannick Chaze, CTO and co-Founder of Sweep.
Sweep is a sustainability data platform that helps organisations track carbon emissions, manage ESG data and ensure regulatory compliance. It enables data-driven action to reduce environmental impact across value chains.
Chaze writes in full as follows…
When we talk about GreenOps, the conversation often starts and ends with optimisation and savings: lower cloud bills, reduced waste, fewer emissions through better resource utilisation. These outcomes matter, but they only tell part of the story.
Viewed more broadly, GreenOps represents a shift from compliance and cost-cutting towards truly operationalising sustainability to support business growth. Insights into carbon emissions will gives organisations the insight they need to innovate responsibly, differentiate in the market, make better decisions both strategic and in the day-to-day and ultimately gain a competitive advantage. This is what elevates GreenOps beyond FinOps-as-cost-police and into a strategic capability.
Technology is now embedded even in the most traditional businesses. As a result, sustainability can no longer sit in a reporting silo. It must be embedded into how technology is built, deployed and operated. GreenOps provides a shared framework that connects engineering, finance and sustainability teams, to collectively drive growth.
Cost, carbon & water
Swwep CTO Chaze: Sustainability can no longer sit in a reporting silo. It must be embedded into how technology is built, deployed & operated.
In the cloud, cost and environmental impact are inseparable. The same workloads that increase spend also drive emissions. But it’s not just about carbon. For resource-intensive industries like IT, water consumption is becoming an equally critical concern.
It’s well-known that datacentres rely on enormous volumes of water for cooling. As climate pressures intensify and water stress increases in many regions, companies need visibility into both their carbon footprint and their water usage. True GreenOps means understanding the full environmental cost of digital infrastructure both in kilograms of CO₂e and in litres of water consumed to keep systems running. This is particularly urgent as companies scale globally.
AI raises the stakes for visibility
The need for better visibility is accelerating with the rapid adoption of AI. It’s now widespread knowledge that training and building AI models is computationally intensive, energy-hungry and water-dependent.
Hence very few companies can do it. But so is using AI in day-to-day operations. A rapidly increasing number of business applications and consumer products are now embedding AI in some way. Employees are triggering AI in their day-day, consciously or not. As such, for many organisations, AI workloads are quickly becoming one of the largest, yet-least-understood contributors to cloud emissions.
At Sweep, we practice what we preach: credibility starts with accountability. That’s why we built our Impact Tracker to monitor the carbon footprint of AI usage within our own sustainability intelligence platform. Sweep customers can see the emissions generated by our AI agents and integrate this data into their reporting and decision-making.
Our approach can be summed up like this: if we’re asking companies to measure their environmental impact, we have to be accountable for our own first.
Democratisation drives cultural transformation
One of the most powerful aspects of GreenOps is its ability to democratise environmental data. When carbon and cost data is accessible across product, engineering, procurement and operations teams – not locked in a single FinOps silo – they can actually take meaningful actions that benefit the business. Ownership is established.
Teams can optimise based on real-time insights rather than waiting for top-down mandates based on what is likely to be out-of-date data. This cultural shift, enabled by collaborative platforms, elevates GreenOps from a compliance exercise into a strategic capability embedded across the business.
Companies that treat GreenOps as a strategic priority rather than just a reporting obligation are the ones that can truly unlock the ROI of sustainability. They understand that managing what you measure applies to carbon, water and resource efficiency broadly. And they’re supporting their entire organisation with the intelligence to act at every level.
Growth, efficiency & carbon intensity
Beyond visibility and cost-cutting, the real value of GreenOps emerges when organisations move from defensive cost avoidance to strategic opportunity. This entails using shared data to guide decisions rather than simply to reduce spend.
With granular cloud carbon visibility, broken down by service, region and workload, teams can make decisions that actively support growth. This might mean developing lower-carbon products, differentiating in procurement processes or responding more effectively to sustainability-conscious customers. Carbon data doesn’t just show where to reduce costs, it also highlights where targeted investment can create growth and competitive advantage.
It is also vital to recognise the importance of carbon intensity for growing businesses. As usage increases, it can be acceptable for absolute emissions to rise, provided overall intensity per product, employee, or unit of revenue is more efficient compared to other actors in the same sector.
From optimisation to advantage
Ultimately, GreenOps is about moving beyond cost-cutting and emission reduction towards unlocking sustainable business performance.
As regulatory obligations increase, customer expectations evolve and infrastructure demands continue to rise, organisations that understand their full environmental footprint will be better positioned to take full advantage. GreenOps provides the operational foundation to balance innovation, growth and environmental responsibility.
Optimisation is where GreenOps begins. But informed, intentional and most importantly sustainable business growth, is where its real value is realised.