Sustainability as opportunity: a new collaboration between Aiven and OxygenIT

Many businesses see emissions reduction as a cost sink: assigning people, maintaining compliance, the hard labor of calculating carbon signatures. That view is out of date – and a new partnership between Aiven and data provider OxygenIT demonstrates why.

Our premise: your carbon footprint isn't just about understanding emissions; it's about understanding your business. Today, we're announcing a new service that helps with both.

Because from the simplicity of Scope 1 to the complexity of Scope 3, your emissions paint a picture of how you use a first-order business variable: energy. And with today's cloud workloads – everyday SaaS, hybrid infrastructure, and AI at multiple layers in the tech stack – needing more energy than ever, visibility over it can deliver decisive business advantage.

But to see that picture, you need data. Where each watt comes from, how it's being used and the outcomes it leads to. And that's the basis of this new collaboration: giving our customers a single-pane-of-glass view of their emissions profile, including accurate figures for Scope 3 – all in the Aiven dashboard many of you use today. Let's summarize how it works.

(For the details, see our new whitepaper: "Making Cloud Emissions Visible", available at https://go.aiven.io/cloud-emissions-whitepaper.)

From emissions data to business enabler…

For decades, IT energy consumption was treated as normal overhead. Consistent. Predictable. Boring, even. But as the cloud developed, that overhead became harder to measure, with costs abstracted into unit pricing, aggregated by managed services, and spread across third-party providers. Today, modern applications are scaling that energy factor upwards – dramatically.

Two deployments with identical business outcomes can have radically different emissions profiles, depending on how infrastructure is organized and how energy flows in and out. Turning energy from a flat overhead into a critical success factor that deserves optimization.

Looked at this way, your sources of carbon emissions – underutilized infrastructure, inefficient data pipelines, poorly chosen locations, legacy IT architecture – can all flag up business inefficiencies ripe for improvement. Opportunities include:

• Services where energy use is scaling faster than revenue
• Workloads running in regions dependent on legacy energy sources
• Systems provisioned for peak demand that never arises
• Managed services whose convenience masks high resource use

If you can measure those numbers, you can manage them. So sustainability data is more than an ESG score; it's a diagnostic tool. But measuring accurately is a key pain point – and that's where Aiven and OxygenIT come in.

…and bulk costs to fine-grained detail

What makes measurement hard is that today's IT estate – cloud infrastructure, managed databases, streaming platforms and third-party services – largely falls outside most companies' direct operational boundary. These carbon emissions are what regulators label Scope 3. Taking in 15 categories, Scope 3 emissions are broad, deep, and interdependent, with huge uncertainties in calculation.

This means is if you try to calculate your Scope 3 emissions directly – for example, aggregating total watts used across your IT operations – the result will be missing context.

A watt that came from a gas-fired power station has a different emissions number than one from a solar farm. The profile of a relaxed datacenter with older equipment will differ from a modern build crackling with busy CPUs. And these differences aren't quantifiable by direct measurement; there are no sensors apportioning shares of emissions to the thousands of companies using them.

That's where OxygenIT adds value. Our ISO-certified partner has accurate proxy data for a huge catalog of IT use cases, spanning behavioral traits of individual server models to mix-of-energy profiles for major global economies.

By intelligently applying these proxies to your own IT estate – providers, locations, applications, and more – your total emissions become visible in your Aiven dashboard, in as much detail as you want, with no separate reports or new applications to deal with. Data points include:

• The type of hardware and its performance envelope
• Locations of datacenters and their emissions profiles
• Sources of power and the national energy mix
• Datacenter rates of utilization and economies of scale
• Equipment Total Cost of Ownership including end-of-life costs

Once energy and emissions are visible at a meaningful level of detail, they enable smart decisionmaking – and that's where business value appears.

A new way to optimize IT costs, from Aiven and OxygenIT

This data provides detailed visibility into how cloud services and workloads are actually used: where they run, how they scale, and how resources are consumed, with OxygenIT's datasets and business intelligence mapping that usage to energy sources, grid characteristics, and other emissions factors. If the metric matters, the data is in there.

Taken together, this turns abstract sustainability reporting into high-grade insight – a practical way to understand how the right technical choices about infrastructure and partners translate to more efficient energy use, lower emissions metrics, and greater business value.

The aim isn't to put yet another dashboard on people's desks. It's to make sustainability data operational – a source engineering and architecture teams can act on.

Sustainability as business strategy, not moral virtue

Of course, compliance pressures around emissions reporting aren't going away – and as ESG-forward companies, Aiven and OxygenIT see effective regulation as a vital part of the world's green ambitions. (However many roadbumps there are on the way.) But we hope you now see how a sole focus on compliance misses the bigger picture.

In an energy-impacted, compute-hungry world, a critical eye on energy wins three times. It lets you reduce carbon emissions, boost IT efficiency, and improve financial performance for the company as a whole.

The organizations that recognize this early will treat sustainability less as a tax on resources, and more as a lens on how their systems really work.

That's why green credibility today isn't a cost – but an opportunity. To learn more about what it could bring to your cloud operations, see our joint whitepaper:

Download the whitepaper here: [link]

About Aiven

Aiven is a global data and AI platform company that enables organizations to get more value from their data. The Aiven Data and AI Platform combines open-choice services to rapidly stream, store and serve data across major cloud providers — simply and securely. Aiven is trusted by thousands of customers worldwide to power their innovation and create next-generation applications confidently and quickly.

Aiven is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, with global offices in Europe, North America and Asia.

Visit us at aiven.io and follow us on LinkedIn and X.