The global shift to understand and enforce ESG compliance is being driven by a wave of mandatory disclosure laws from regulators in regions across the EU, APAC, and the Americas. Understanding the emissions profile of the organization and its value chain is now essential for companies where cloud computing accounts for a significant portion of their carbon footprint. How organizations gain direct correlation from compute to carbon in order to meet sustainability goals, regulatory reporting, and third-party commitments remains a critical challenge.
Embracing "ESG CloudOps, "the practice of aligning cloud operations with sustainability goals, is no longer just a "nice to have"; it's a business imperative.
Here is how New Relic's Intelligent Observability Platform can act as your secret weapon in driving a more sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective cloud strategy.
The Intersect of FinOps and GreenOps
The core principle of both cloud cost optimization and cloud sustainability is eliminating waste. Idle servers, over-provisioned clusters, and unmanaged cloud storage service consumes unnecessary energy and inflates your carbon emissions.
With New Relic Cloud Cost Intelligence (CCI), you get an observability-native FinOps capability that provides near real-time visibility into your multi-cloud and Kubernetes environments. By surfacing cost-optimization insights, CCI helps you eliminate resource waste—directly enabling your teams to quantify and reduce the energy consumption (and Scope 3 emissions) that feed into your sustainability reporting."
Identify and Eliminate Waste: Uncover idle or underutilized resources that are drawing power without delivering business value. These processes can not only be a financial drain but also a concealed leach that is driving up energy and emissions.
Right-Size Infrastructure: Get data-driven recommendations based on actual usage patterns and seasonality, ensuring you only run (and power) the compute you actually need. More efficient code means less processing time, which translates directly to lower energy consumption at the data center level.
Strengthen Accountability: Scorecards enable you to track the operational efficiency of teams or services by attributing infrastructure usage and costs. By gaining system-wide context that ties infrastructure health directly to application performance, you can run your environments leaner without risking reliability or the customer experience. This creates a culture where developers factor in both financial and environmental costs when making architectural decisions, helping the organization meet decarbonization targets.
When you optimize your cloud spend, you directly reduce your energy consumption, a win-win for your budget and your decarbonization targets.
Leading by Example: New Relic's Own Sustainability Journey
We don't just provide the tools for sustainable CloudOps; we walk the walk. New Relic is proud to be the only observability company to set a net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions goal by 2030, with near-term targets approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) .
A massive part of our decarbonization strategy focuses on our own cloud operations, which accounted for 48.9% of our total emissions in our 2024 fiscal year. By leveraging our own observability practices, we migrated applicable workloads from on-premises data centers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using AWS Graviton-based instances. The results were transformative: a 37% reduction in carbon emissions for those migrated workloads, coupled with a 15-20% improvement in performance efficiency.
This demonstrates a clear blueprint for our customers: modern, efficient cloud architectures monitored through comprehensive observability can drastically slash your carbon footprint.
Observability for a Better World
Achieving your ESG goals requires more than good intentions; it requires accurate data, deep visibility, and actionable insights. By making observability a core pillar of your CloudOps strategy, you can confidently build a technology ecosystem that grows efficiently, and sustainably.
Ready to reduce your digital carbon footprint? Let New Relic help you turn your sustainability targets into measurable reality. Learn more about our ESG initiatives in our 2026 Impact Report.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (support.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.
