Digital Sustainability and GreenOps – Mark Butcher, Posetiv

This is techstrong tv. Welcome to techstrong tv. I'm Bonnie Schneider.

Today I'm pleased to be joined by Mark Butcher, managing director and founder of Positive A consultancy specializing in green ops, finops and DevOps. Mark brings over 25 years of experience in the IT sector of helping organizations modernize and transform their IT services. Today he leads positive with their focus on digital sustainability, showing businesses how taking an eco-friendly approach can not only reduce carbon emissions, but also boost profitability while supporting their NetZero goals.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you on techstrong TV today.

I was wondering if you, we can start with you telling us a little bit more about your background and the motivation behind starting positive. Okay, so that's, that's quite an easy one. So I'm clearly not as young as I once was.

I've spent a long time in it and I've seen everything pretty much come and go and I've seen all the trends, particularly the, you know, the last decade of the panicked rush to the cloud because it's the best thing ever. So in my, in my time and in my personal life, I'm also very focused on the environment. And what I recognized was after spending a lot of time working in service providers, that there was a real opportunity to link my passion at home for the environment, with helping people in large enterprises transform how they deliver their services, do it from the context of sustainability.

So we form positive simply for, for that reason, which was to help people become more sustainable in, in enterprise it. That's great. So, um, what are the key challenges that you find in transforming IT services to be more sustainable and remain cost effective?

Okay, that's, I cannot, I cannot answer that in quite a blunt way, to be fair. Um, it's, uh, it's people, uh, so it's, it's not really the, it's not really technology that's not really the problem, albeit it does sit in the way. Um, it's kind of is multifaceted and the biggest thing that we have to do is to deal with legacy, to deal with the culture change that's needed and, and try and get around the idea of resistance from a bank.

And, and there's also a bigger problem, which is people actually getting to understand the problem they're trying to solve cuz people think they understand sustainability and particularly within the context of it, but typically they only understand a very small proportion of it. So there is a lot of education that needs to be done and it also requires quite a large organizational culture shift as well to become more sustainable in your, in your everyday day-to-day thinking. I think that's a really good point that people only understand a small portion of it.

Um, before we get to the ne the next question I just wanna ask you, if you can just expand on that a little bit, like what you're finding. Cause I know that, um, when I follow you on LinkedIn, there's a lot of conversations going on, but there's a lot of people that aren't quite clear on, um, everything there is to know about green software and how to be more sustainable. Um, can you speak to that and, and, and what you're finding, what people think it is and what it really is?

Yeah, I think what, what people think it is, they, they often believe it's actually quite a simple thing when it's actually not. So often what I hear is people saying, well, you know, we're, we're in a sustainable data center. Our data center p u e is very low, or we, we, we use renewable energy or we recycle our infrastructure so we're all okay.

Not realizing actually it's so much more complex than that. And there are so many other areas where, I mean, even that simple thing of the renewable energy comment that just because you are paying for renewable energy, trust me, it doesn't mean you're actually using renewable energy unless you are directly connected to the source of renewable energy. So a, you know, a wind farm or hydropower, that's not what you're actually consuming.

What you're consuming is what falls out the plug in the location that you're in. And that can be a blend of anything from coal, gas, oil, nuclear, wind, hydro, any blend of act completely. And, and then there's, when we actually look at enterprise IT, that if we were very, very honest with ourselves, um, we all know secretly that big, it is not very efficient in the way that it's run and operated.

There's an awful lot of legacy, there's an awful lot of complexity that we know we can get rid of. So it's not just sustainability kind of of it that we need, we need to think of it's sustainability in it. And the in it bit is really important because if you take, say the average cloud environment, um, you'll find the average enterprise cloud user is wasting somewhere between 30 and 45% of their cloud spend.

Think how many emissions could be reduced just by operating a little more efficiently? That is great. And I don't think people realize that.

So thank you for clarifying that. Um, when it comes to buying choices, how do organizations gather meaningful information from technology vendors to evaluate their environmental impact? I mean, a lot of people say, we're agreeing, we're agreeing, but how do you really know when, when you're making those decisions?

Well, if you listen to all the vendors, you know, they're practically perfect in every single way. Mm-hmm. And the truth is that the data and information is really hard to get.

And I think the vendor ecosystem has got to go on a huge journey themselves on what they do with regard to sustainability reporting and sharing of information. Because the problem we have is that almost every vendor is calculating it in different ways. They're calculating their emissions using a different calculation model.

They're releasing the information in different ways. They're selectively sometimes choosing which emissions categories they want to share and which ones they want to exclude. Uh, and, and obviously some of 'em are real, even weaponizing it to, to make it a a marketing thing as opposed to a, a reason for transparency.

And then I think the last bit is, um, they generally don't make it really easy to find the information. Uh, you know, it, it's typically released on PDFs that you have to scrape the web to try and find the information's often very, very out of date. And the key thing is it rarely actually reflects the reality of the configuration that you've actually purchased or deployed.

That's a good point. Um, in the context of DevOps, because our viewers on Textron TV are very immersed in the, in the DevOps world, so I know they're gonna be interested in your perspective on this. So in, in the context of DevOps, how can organizations seamlessly integrate digital sustainability practices into their processes?

So DevOps teams are absolutely at the front, the front line of actually helping us fix this problem. Cuz they're the ones who are building the applications and the services and the tooling that we all use day to day. So there's so much they can do once they get to grips with the, with, with the problem they're trying to solve.

And to do that they need meaningful data that makes sense to the context of how they do their jobs. And so there's some great, great organizations like the Green Software Foundation, uh, creating their, their software intensity metrics that for developers to use. And so they can adopt loads of eco-friendly coding practices, they can look at, um, a greater implementation of automation because taking people out the way is a really good way of, of reducing wastage because automation can, can speed up the functions, can speed up what you're doing, it can change and transform everything you're doing in fact.

And, um, one, one other is there is, is choosing the right, right services. So choosing to run your workloads in the right cloud area or the right platform in the right location, choosing the right coding language to make it more efficient. And even the big thing they can do that a lot of people miss is challenge what is increasingly DAF business requirements quite often.

So businesses make some really strange requirements and things, you know, for permanent 24 by seven up time for a service that isn't needed. Uh, they'll, they'll want endless amounts of data to be retained forever. There's so many things that actually if you challenge the requirements, you can reduce the size of the footprint substantially.

That's, that's really helpful to know. You mentioned cloud, so I was wondering if you can share with us, um, what important factors should organizations consider to ensure environmental sustainability and cloud deployments? Okay, so if you listen to the cloud providers, uh, you believe they were greener than green, practically perfect.

Again, like everyone else, the truth is cloud providers data centers are absolutely very efficient. Um, their infrastructure is very well run. It's very well optimized because that's how they make huge amounts of profit.

But that doesn't mean that they're any more or less sustainable than a non-premise or a co-location type infrastructure. So you need to take into context the location of where they're operating from. So choose the right cloud location.

If, for example, if you were looking at your scope two emissions, power related emissions, you would often want to choose somewhere like say, Sweden, France, Scotland, those types of locations because of the, the blend of renew blendy they use. Um, and then you, and then you need to look at how are you building your services. So whatever you do from a sustainability perspective, do not do a lift and shift.

Do not just pick up all your old legacy and dump it in the cloud because you are gonna be burning emissions like crazy. If you do that, you need to look at using the right tooling for the right platforms and consolidate everything you can. Just make everything as efficient as you can.

And then when you get into the, when you're running in the cloud, don't fall into the trap that nearly everyone does, which is the cloud waste thing that we talked about earlier. So optimize your services, get rid of all your cloud waste, consider sustainability of the cloud as well as in the cloud. Um, mark, I, I neglected to ask you where you are based, but I'm guessing it's the uk It's definitely the uk so about half an hour outside of London.

Wonderful. You know, um, we are here in the US and um, in the UK we've been reading a lot about new requirements that are coming for businesses reporting, um, around E S G. And I was wondering, um, if you could touch upon that and also explain as for those that are watching us here in the states, uh, what are the po potential business advantages, uh, prioritizing eco-friendly approaches and embracing digital sustainability?

I know there there's going to be people that are gonna have to deal with this sooner than later in different parts of the world, but um, a lot of people are unfamiliar with that. So could, could you kind of break that down for us? Yeah, no, absolutely.

So it's legislation is just one of the areas that is really gonna give you a competitive advantage here because you look at whichever angle you come from, whichever market you operate in, legislation is coming or is already here, it doesn't matter what sector you're in, you're either going to have SEC sector related legislation, you're gonna have government re related legislation. If you look at the eu, the C S R D, which is coming in place from January, 2024, which affects any organization globally who trade in the European Union who are turning over more than I think the figure is 50 million or has more than 500 people. And what that's going to be demanding is transparency on their emissions reporting.

So reporting all emissions of all scopes, no longer hiding and masking things by using offsets, giving absolute clarity on the actual truth of their emissions. But that's only kinda one area and you're, we're already seeing the same thing coming from places like the S e c. Mm-hmm.

Um, we're being, um, international standards boards appearing. So whichever angle you come from, there's going to be the requirement for additional governance and transparency, but then when you break it into other areas, which is gonna make a difference, there's investor pressure. So investors are increasingly placing massive scrutiny on companies sustainability adherence though looking at their net zero plans, looking at what they're actually doing.

And the reason they're doing that is because they're finding investors that they actually make more money out of organizations who are operating more sustainably. That could be because they're more efficient, but it could be because of things at risk mitigation. But then you've got things like customer expectations.

The customers buying patterns are massively changing. They're, they're increasingly becoming environmentally conscious and that's a B2B as well as seeing a personal buying b2c. They expect kind of the organizations to actually be completely transparent to their commitment to the su sustainability.

They want aligned values, they want to make sure that sustainable practices are really being implemented. So no greenwash. Um, and that is absolutely becoming a massive competitive advantage.

And the last bit, which literally everyone ignores and particularly in tech it's becoming really important is Gen Z is now coming through into the workplace at rates you've never seen before. And they do not want to work for organizations who are not aligned with their values at all their values and their ethics. So what we're finding is, particularly in tech, it's getting really hard for some organizations to recruit people simply because they, they don't want to go and work for them.

They won't even apply for the roles. So unless you operating more sustainably, you're actually not gonna be able to find the people who could these next generation applications and services who are your next market That that's such a great point. You know, we saw that with the millennials, but we're seeing it even more so with Gen Z that's coming up.

So I agree and Make decisions hard. Yeah. And that really is, um, one of the big deciding factors they may take if you have a great software developer engineer, they're gonna pick the company that's doing the most in that area.

So, excellent point. Um, well we talked a lot about the positives. Uh, can you discuss some of the obstacles that organizations may encounter, um, when trying to implement green ops strategies and, and and also how they may overcome those obstacles?

Yeah, there's um, a lot of them. So we work on these projects every day and we see consistently the same mistakes being made. Uh, the first one is not actually having a baseline and not being transparent about your actual emissions.

So not really understanding where you are, what your emissions are, and not calculating in a inaccurate fashion because the reality is how can you reduce something that you haven't measured? How can you claim to be making progress if you don't even know where you started from when you're not communicating it? So that's one of the first things.

The next thing is, um, we, we have a massively unhealthy obsession in tech with dashboards. Now everyone thinks we've gotta create a new dashboard, a new tool, and new service. You don't, what you need is meaningful data that you can give to your users in a format that makes sense.

So stop focusing all your love and attention on creating dashboards and focus more on getting your data right than underpinned. And that, and that applies for these organizations who are turning up trying to sell dashboard tooling because every single has says the same thing once you get underneath it. They say all you need to do is connect your data.

Well that's no use if your data isn't trustworthy. Cuz if you give your users data, which they don't believe in, they're not gonna do anything with it. Then the next, the next couple of points are kind of very interlined, um, volunteer guild.

I am getting a little bit bored with organizations creating teams of volunteers. We're not empowered to deliver anything. They get like-minded people who get together who want to actually do something, but they're not actually empowered to actually contribute.

They don't have a mandate and the key thing they don't have is budget. What you need is dedicated budget towards these projects and programs. So you can actually do something once you identify an initiative, which then comes onto misaligning it with your strategy.

So if it's not aligned part of your overarching transformation strategy, which inevitably it typically isn't, you're really going to struggle cuz you're going in different directions as an organization. So you'll going in one direction with your wider IT strategy and another one with your sustainability folk coming in effectively trying to push water uphill is probably the phrase I would use. And, and then it, then it's targets and KPIs not actually counting.

So leaders absolutely have to take responsibility and accountability here. It's not, not enough just to spread targets around the bottom for car decarbonization. They need to flow up and down and the pain needs to be felt equally both inside and outside of it.

So you need meaningful KPIs, meaningful targets and things that OKRs that actually make sense that also aligned with everything else in your organization. And then the last minute you actually need to write up a plan. No, that's, that's a really good point.

I think you're right about dashboards. It can be overwhelming, you know, seeing all this information. The main thing is the person reading the dashboard has to know how to interpret it and, and how they're gonna use it and, and you as you mentioned, drive a plan forward from it.

So, um, that's, um, a good observation. One of the things that you mentioned in, in the answer to your last question was trustworthiness and trust. So that leads us into this question.

How does digital sustainability align with the goals and practices of cybersecurity teams? See, you might think there's absolutely no alignment whatsoever. And I, I've heard people say that, but actually if you think about it, if you replace the word sustainability that I've been using here with say efficiency, what we're talking about is consolidated, optimized, well run automated ecosystems.

Security teams love that SE security teams love things that are automated and standardized. They love getting rid of complexity, they love getting rid of legacy. And that's what we're talking about doing here is just making things as well run efficient and optimized as they can be, eliminating all the natural waste.

And also within security, there's a huge focus on risk and governance, which is exactly the same as within the world of sustainability. It's rigid structures well applied. So I think there's actually a really good alignment even though you might not think so.

And you mentioned, um, automation, so, um, everyone is trying to digitally transform as quickly as possible. Automation is a great tool for that. How, how can automation, can you give us some examples of how that might be used in sustainability efforts?

Yeah, so some really easy ones. Um, so if you're operating say a, a VDI platform in the cloud, a desktop virtualization in the cloud, how many p how many organizations users work? 24 by seven, not very many.

You can easily automate the switching off of resources when they're not being used. So you could terminate those cloud desktops automatically look by looking into things like calendars or teams holders and actually looking to understand when the users are active or not active, automate switching off the resources. And that would reduce your related emissions platform by about 68% just in one e one easy example.

And you can apply the same thing to any other form resources where you are automatically bright sizing, you're automatically terminate, terminating, unused instances. You use automation for storage tiering to get your data onto the right tier of storage that is less power hungry. So, so many areas like that that make very simple changes very quickly.

That's great. And how can organizations authentically communicate their digital sustainability initiatives without falling into the trap of greenwashing? Yeah, transparency and honesty.

Own, own the problem that you're trying to solve. Stop denying the scale of the emissions that you actually have and use a transparent calculation model that you're not scared of sharing. Cuz actually one thing that, that we don't talk about often enough, you go back to my comment earlier, which is data being a problem.

One of the issues we have is most people are going, uh, are aiming for a net zero target and they're, they're claiming they're going to get reduced emissions over the next couple of years, gotta get breaks and bad news to them. They're not as, as the data quality improves from their supply chain, they're going to find that no matter how efficient they are, the emissions they report are going to increase over the next couple of years. So right now it's about getting in front of that problem, owning it from an efficiency perspective and optimizing everything you can to eliminate as much as possible so that, so that as your data does improve in quality, you can start squashing the hard bits so you can start getting moved towards actually producing the emissions in a, in a structured way.

Uh, we mentioned a little bit about the new E S G rules. Um, where do you see the future going with this specifically for DevOps, for green DevOps? Um, so I, I see DevOps teams and green DevOps teams massively heavily towards well optimized environments.

I see a huge amount of auditing coming in, so, and standardized, automating. Um, so I see automation being driven literally everywhere and I think we're gonna see the elimination of a lot of the manual tasks that are coming through already. So the DevOps teams are going to be under a lot of pressure to operate significantly faster and more efficiently and in a more standardized manner.

Tha that's for sure. Well, mark Butcher, managing director and founder of Positive, you're are so knowledgeable on this topic and it was really just a pleasure to have you on Text Strong tv. The whole conversation just flew by.

It was so fascinating and I, I hope you'll be able to join us again soon. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.

Great. Well stay with us on Text Strong tv. We'll have more after this.