GreenOps: From cost to carbon

The scale of the problem

Software waste in enterprise IT is larger than most organisations realize. According to the Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index¹, 46% of applications across the average organisation go underutilised or unused, adding up to an average of $19.8 million in wasted SaaS spend per organisation annually.

That’s a striking financial number. But translate it into energy terms and the picture becomes equally compelling. Every application running in the background — whether anyone is using it or not, is consuming compute resources, drawing on server capacity, and generating emissions. Waste at scale isn’t just a budget problem. It’s an environmental one.

¹ Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index

Where software waste shows up

Unused and underutilised licences

Licenses assigned to employees who have left, tools adopted for a pilot that never scaled, seat counts purchased in bulk to meet minimum vendor thresholds, all result in paid software that delivers no value. The financial cost is well documented. The carbon cost is less visible, but just as real. Maintaining idle software means maintaining the infrastructure that supports it, servers, storage, cooling, all of which consume energy regardless of utilisation.

Over-provisioned cloud resources

Cloud environments are particularly prone to waste. Resources provisioned for peak demand but rarely at capacity, development environments left running outside working hours, storage allocated and forgotten, all represent energy consumed by workloads that don’t justify it. Rightsizing cloud resources is one of the most immediate ways organisations can reduce both their cloud bill and their cloud emissions simultaneously.

Shadow IT and application sprawl

The average organisation now runs well over 100 applications, many acquired outside formal procurement processes. Without a clear picture of the full estate, waste compounds invisibly. From a GreenOps perspective, what you can’t see, you can’t reduce.