How a Midmarket SaaS Cut Cloud Emissions by 40 Percent and Costs by 25 Percent

Executive summary This case study chronicles the journey of ClearDesk, a midmarket SaaS company, that achieved a 40 percent reduction in cloud carbon emissions and a 25 percent reduction in monthly spend over 12 months by aligning sustainability goals with FinOps best practices.

When sustainability and cost goals are co owned, teams find overlapping levers that improve both metrics.

ClearDesk serves business productivity customers and runs a multi region deployment across three cloud regions. Their challenge was rapid traction in revenue but ballooning costs and a growing sustainability mandate from leadership. The approach combined measurement, incentives, and targeted technical workstreams.

Phase 1: Baseline and visibility

They began with measurement. ClearDesk implemented resource level tagging, integrated usage into a cost and carbon analytics platform, and established baselines for monthly spend and estimated emissions. The team focused on a small set of services that accounted for 80 percent of energy consumption: compute instances, managed databases, and streaming services.

Phase 2: Low friction interventions

Quick wins included rightsizing instances, switching long running non critical workloads to spot instances, and introducing aggressive lifecycle policies for storage. Operators scheduled nonurgent batch workloads for nights when grid intensity historically runs lower. They also migrated archival data to deep archive storage tiers.

Phase 3: Platform and architecture changes

ClearDesk invested in a platform team that introduced autoscaling templates, standardized instance families, and promoted containerized workloads. They gradually moved workloads to managed services optimized for multi tenant operations which reduced duplicated baseline utilization.

Phase 4: Energy aware scheduling and regions

By incorporating grid carbon intensity signals into deployment choices, the platform routed non latency sensitive jobs to regions with lower carbon intensity. They created a scheduling layer that selected compute location based on a combination of latency requirements, cost, and carbon footprint.

Phase 5: Governance and cultural changes

ClearDesk aligned incentives by adding sustainability and cost targets to quarterly objectives. They ran workshops and published dashboards so product owners could see the environmental and financial impacts of feature choices. Over time engineers learned to prefer designs that minimized sustained compute.

Quantitative results

• Cloud spend down 25 percent year over year
• Estimated emissions down 40 percent due to region shifting and improved utilization
• Mean time to resolution for cost incidents reduced by 35 percent after automating alerts

Lessons learned

• Visibility first Without per resource telemetry, teams cannot identify high impact levers.
• Don't rely on single metric Track cost, carbon intensity, and performance to avoid optimizing one dimension at the expense of others.
• Small wins buy trust Start with quick wins to build momentum for larger investments.

Conclusion The ClearDesk case shows that cost optimization and sustainability are complementary when measured and incentivized together. The technical investments paid back financially and improved product reliability as a side effect.