From CSRD compliance to genuine green IT (without greenwashing)

Fact: CSRD reports do not help you operate in a more sustainable manner. In practice, they mainly help you demonstrate that you have documented something. This is not what you want, and in this blog, I will show you how you can be compliant and also benefit from it.

“The IT emissions figures in our CSRD report comply with the rules. However, they do not contribute to the sustainability of our IT in any way.” That's what the sustainability manager of one of our clients in the finance sector said. That's quite a statement, but I hear it often. To add to that: “The big four produce beautiful reports that comply with the letter of the law, but they contribute nothing to what the regulations are intended for: increasing the sustainability of your organization. They are paper tigers.”

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. We've seen this before. In security, there are also two worlds: compliant (following the rules) versus resilient (actually being secure). You can tick all the boxes and still be flat on your back tomorrow.

The same thing is happening now with “green IT.” Organizations are investing in dashboards, scorecards, data collection, external assurance, and beautiful graphs. It looks good and mature. But under the hood, everything continues to run as it always has: too big, too long, too often, too little focus on usage.

And that's a shame, because ‘greening’ your IT shouldn't be a cost center. If implemented properly, it's a powerful lever. When ‘greening’ is done right, the results are immediate and tangible:

Better reputation (not just on paper)
Lower emissions (measurable in kWh and CO2)
Lower costs (FinOps)
Increased productivity (faster systems, less waiting time)

And happier employees.

In this blog, I will take you through the measures you can take to not only get your CSRD ‘in order’, but also to make your IT lighter, more economical, and more efficient. No greenwashing. No report factory. Just buttons that you, as a CIO, IT manager, or director, can press today.

No reduction without measurement: how to find hidden IT emissions

Without hard data, you can't do anything.

If you want to reduce emissions, you first need to know where those emissions originate, when they occur, and what triggers them. An energy bill is, at best, the proverbial smoke detector: it beeps, but it doesn't tell you where the fire is. And if IT isn't measured separately, “using less” often amounts to nothing more than hoping that someone somewhere will press the right button.

What you need is control data: per workload, per time period, linked to usage. Because timing is everything. An environment that does nothing at night but continues to run at full capacity is not ‘stable IT’. It's wastefulness with an SLA sticker on it ;)

Here's an example from our practice. A customer ran 40 terminal servers that were on 24/7. When we started measuring, the reality turned out to be very simple: on working days, they were really busy for about 9 hours. The rest of the time, they were just... there. Do the math: 45 hours per week of useful work, 123 hours per week of ‘twiddling thumbs’. Based on that data, we shut down 35 of the 40 servers outside those peak hours. The result: a 64% reduction in energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, without users noticing a thing. The service remained the same. Only the leak was plugged. And... savings were made!

This doesn't just happen with servers. We also track down applications with disproportionate energy consumption. And you almost always see the same pattern there: inefficient queries, unnecessary retries, log and retention proliferation, batch jobs at the wrong time, and resources that are oversized “just in case.” Optimization reduces consumption—often drastically.

The great thing is: greening is not a separate project here. It is a chain reaction. Less consumption means less (virtual) hardware or cloud resources. Fewer resources means lower licensing costs. And optimized applications become faster, which directly boosts your organization's productivity.

We regularly halve the consumption of applications. And often even more than that. Not by reporting. By measuring and managing.

Stop stacking hardware: optimization is your greenest measure

When users complain that something is “too slow,” IT often resorts to the quickest fix: more hardware. More cores, more memory, larger instances. Sometimes that's justified. If your organization has really grown and your consumption is keeping pace with customer volume, transactions, or revenue, then scaling up makes sense.

But something happens here that causes things to go wrong in the long run: adding more becomes automatic. And after the fire has been put out, the extra capacity remains in place as if it were a law of nature.

Therefore: solve the immediate problem – fine. And then immediately look at the metric that really matters: efficiency.

Not “CPU is green” or “the cloud is flexible,” but hard ratios:

kWh per transaction.
Kg CO₂ per user.
Cost per order.

If those figures creep up while your business is not growing at the same pace, then there is no “capacity problem.” That is an efficiency problem.

Software wears out. Not because the code is getting old, but because the environment is changing. Data is growing. Infrastructure changes. New OS and database versions behave slightly differently. Lift-and-shift to the cloud sometimes literally puts an inefficient on-prem situation on a more expensive, faster billing platform. And software is often inefficient at its core. It happens. Forget the question of blame. It's reality. And that's exactly what you want to solve: improved efficiency.

Optimization is the most underestimated greening measure. Because you don't have to choose between “green” or “performance.” Optimization gives you both.

And no, this isn't about a few percent. This is about seriously big leaps:

A data warehouse that runs 110 times faster
An invoicing flow that runs 3× faster
Wait times on a webshop reduced from 7 seconds to less than 1 second

This is not only good for users. It is pure reduction: less compute, less storage IO, less peak capacity.

If you become faster by running smarter, you don't need to add more. You can actually remove things. And that is greening: less hardware, fewer cloud resources, less energy, and less CO₂.

From CSRD figures to real reduction

You can spend another quarter on reports that “add up.”

Or you can see in 30 minutes where your IT is consuming unnecessarily and what you can reverse tomorrow.

At Sciante, we have been working with organizations for over 15 years to reduce energy consumption, CO₂ emissions, and costs through optimization and targeted measures. No greenwashing. No tool fetish. Just hard data: reduce those costs per transaction, costs per user, costs per workload. So you know which button has the most effect.

In a no-obligation appointment, we will look at:

Where your environment runs 24/7 without delivering value
Which applications consume a disproportionate amount of energy
Where optimization can reduce capacity (and emissions) instead of increasing them

Want to achieve those savings too? Chances are I can tell you within 15 minutes where your budget is being wasted. Send me an informatie [at] sciante [dot] nl (subject: Reductie) (email) or schedule a no-obligation call right away. You'll get clarity, options, and an initial roadmap.