Carbon footprint of your full stack

This post discusses the following subjects:

• What is a ESG strategy
• You can't control what you don't measure
• How to measure the full stack carbon footprint
• A solution from Climatiq
• Extensibility of the Cisco FSO Platform
• Just one month to build the integration

What is a ESG strategy

In the context of information technology (IT), an ESG strategy involves applying the principles of Environmental, Social, and Governance factors specifically to the IT industry and the use of technology within organizations. Here's how each element applies to IT:

1. Environmental (E): In IT, the environmental aspect focuses on the impact of technology on the environment. This includes evaluating the energy consumption of data centers and IT infrastructure, as well as assessing the carbon footprint associated with digital operations and electronic waste management. Companies can adopt environmentally friendly practices by using renewable energy for data centers, implementing energy-efficient hardware and software solutions, and responsibly recycling electronic equipment.

2. Social (S): In the social dimension of IT, the focus is on how technology affects people and communities. This involves considering the ethical use of data, ensuring data privacy and security, promoting digital inclusion, and addressing issues like digital divide and accessibility. Socially responsible IT companies prioritize the protection of user data, work to bridge the digital gap, and develop inclusive technologies that cater to a diverse range of users.

3. Governance (G): Governance in IT pertains to how technology is managed and governed within organizations. This includes assessing the transparency of IT decision-making, the adherence to IT policies and regulations, and the alignment of IT strategies with broader business goals. Good IT governance ensures that technology is used responsibly and ethically and that it aligns with the overall values and objectives of the organization.

By incorporating ESG principles into IT strategies, organizations aim to become more environmentally conscious, socially responsible, and ethically governed in their technological practices. This not only helps businesses reduce their environmental impact and enhance their reputation but also contributes to a more sustainable and inclusive digital world. Additionally, investors in the IT sector increasingly consider ESG factors when evaluating companies' performance and long-term viability.ESG strategy

The purpose of an ESG Strategy is to demonstrate the environmental, social, and governance factors that your organisation believes to be intrinsically important to consider within your current and future business operations.

This post focuses on the "E" in ESG.

You can't control what you don't measure

Collect data toward key performance indicators (KPIs): Once the ESG plan is up and running, it’s time to start collecting data. ESG processes benefit businesses because they provide objective metrics that prove the success of social responsibility efforts. Use the data you gather to track KPIs, measuring success along the way.

How to measure the full stack carbon footprint

Measuring the carbon footprint from the full IT stack involves assessing the environmental impact of various components and processes within the IT infrastructure. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started:

1. Identify Components: First, make a list of all the components within your IT stack. This typically includes data centers, servers, network devices, storage systems, end-user devices (e.g., laptops, desktops, smartphones), and any other IT-related equipment.

2. Energy Consumption: Measure the energy consumption of each component. This can be done using energy monitoring tools, power meters, or data provided by equipment manufacturers. Take into account both the direct energy usage (electricity consumed by the IT equipment) and indirect energy usage (cooling systems, ventilation, etc.).

3. Data Center Efficiency: If you have data centers, assess their efficiency. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is a common metric used to measure data center energy efficiency. It's calculated as the total facility energy consumption divided by the IT equipment energy consumption.

4. Virtualization and Utilization: Analyze the virtualization rate and utilization of servers and other hardware. Virtualization allows running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, which can lead to better resource utilization and energy efficiency.

5. Cloud Services: If your organization uses cloud services, consider the energy consumption of these services. Cloud providers often publish environmental reports that provide insights into their sustainability efforts.

6. Software Efficiency: Evaluate the efficiency of the software applications and services running in your IT stack. Energy-efficient software design and coding practices can help reduce energy consumption.

7. Telecommuting and Travel: Take into account the energy consumption associated with telecommuting (remote work) and business travel when using IT resources. These factors can impact the carbon footprint indirectly.

8. Data Transmission: Assess the energy used for data transmission over networks, including local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs).

9. Emission Factors: Convert energy consumption data into greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using emission factors provided by relevant authorities or industry standards. These factors provide the amount of CO2 equivalent emissions associated with each unit of energy consumed.

10. Calculation and Analysis: Calculate the total carbon footprint of your IT stack by summing up the GHG emissions from all components. Analyze the results to identify areas of high impact and potential opportunities for improvement.

11. Benchmarking and Reporting: Consider benchmarking your carbon footprint against industry standards and best practices. This can help you set targets for reducing emissions and track your progress over time. Create reports and share the findings with stakeholders to raise awareness and support sustainability initiatives.

Keep in mind that measuring the carbon footprint from the full IT stack is a complex task that may require specialized knowledge and tools. Consider involving experts in environmental sustainability or seeking support from organizations specializing in carbon footprint assessments.

A solution from Climatiq

Climatiq provides an embedded carbon intelligence software that enables developers to automate GHG emission calculations based on verified scientific models. Its suite of products includes an open dataset of emission factors, and intelligent APIs that integrate with any existing software for real time monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climatiq offers a calculation engine that allows to convert metrics about cloud CPU and memory usage, storage, and networking traffic to CO2e estimates for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

This service is offered by Climatiq directly, but it's also been used to demonstrate the flexibility and the extensibility of the Cisco Full Stack Observability Platform. Climatiq is one of the first ecosystem partners that collaborated with Cisco, even before the platform was released in June 2023. The integration of the Climatiq engine with the Cost Insight module of the FSO Platform has been presented in a session at Cisco Live, Las Vegas. 

Extensibility of the Cisco FSO Platform

Climatiq's carbon footprint calculation engine was integrated leveraging the developers friendly framework offered by Cisco to create extension modules for the FSO Platform.

With those tools you can model a business domain, or a technical domain, defining entities and their relationships so that you can visualize data in a dashboard that fit your specific business needs.

Telemetry collected from the infrastructure, and from any asset in your business architecture (processes, applications, cloud resources, robots...), is used to populate a view of the world that helps the operations teams and the lines of business to have full control and deep visibility into every component, as well as to roll up all the information at company level dashboards.

You don't need expert programmers to build complex applications, to collect-filter-correlate-visualize data. You just need a domain subject matter expert (e.g. a business analyst, or a SRE) that design a Entity-Relationship diagram and customize a few JSON files that tell the FSO Platform how to manage the incoming telemetry data.

Just one month to build the integration

Building extension modules is so easy that Climatiq, as a Cisco partner, took just one month to build their module. They were educated about the architecture of the system and the developer framework, then they build the module that is now offered in the Cisco FSO marketplace. Every customer that uses the FSO Platform can now subscribe to the extension module from Climatiq and get the carbon footprint calculation instantly in the user interface of their tenant.

The implementation consisted in defining some new metrics (remember, it's all about OpenTelemetry that means Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces) and configuring the connection to the Climatiq API to send data back and forth. Existing metrics in the FSO Platform (CPU and memory usage, storage, and networking traffic) are sent to the calculation engine, that sends additional metrics back to be added to the original entities (e.g. to Kubernetes clusters, deployments, etc.).

So it's easy to navigate your assets in the User Interface to see their health state, as well as related costs and carbon footprint. 

In addition to the emission generated by a single component, that you can roll up to the business transaction and the entire business service, you can also see the aggregated information for the entire company for the day and for last week as well as a projection of possible saving in the emissions if you implements the suggested actions.

Sustainability is just a part of the visibility you want to have about your assets and your processes.

With Full stack Observability you can really model the view of the world that fits your business needs.

And the Cisco FSO Platform is one of the most complete - and extensible - way to collect and correlate the needed information.

Why Application Security is important (and complementary to perimeter security)?

Outstanding application security is foundational to a brand's reputation, creating and building trust and loyalty with users. But vulnerabilities can occur anytime, anywhere (in your code, in commercial applications, in libraries you've integrated and in remote API that you invoke), making it difficult and time-consuming to prioritize responses. 

<Suggestion for people in a rush> If you only have 5 minutes, just scroll down and look at the amazing recorded demo: it explains everything better than the post itself </Suggestion for people in a rush>

Avoiding costly delays that can result in continuing damage to revenue and brand reputation means organizations must have clear visibility into each new vulnerability and the insights needed to prioritize remediation based on their business impact.

The traditional security schema, based on just protecting the perimeter with firewalls and IPS, is no longer sufficient. You need to protect the full stack, including all the software tiers. 

Business Risk Observability

Speed and coordination are paramount when dealing with application security risks.  

Bad actors can take advantage of gaps and delays between siloed security and application teams, resulting in costly and damaging consequences. Traditional vulnerability and threat scanning solutions lack the shared business context needed to rapidly assess risks and align teams based on potential business impact. To triage and align teams as fast as possible, teams need to know where vulnerabilities and threats impact their applications, how likely a risk is to be exploited, and how much business risk each issue presents.

One fundamental use case in Full-Stack Observability is business risk observability, supported by new levels of security intelligence capability that brings business context into application security. The new business risk scoring enables security and applications teams to have a greater threat visibility and intelligent business risk prioritization, so that they respond instantly to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

New Cisco Secure Application features and functionalities include business transaction mapping to understand how and where an attack may occur; threat intelligence feeds from Cisco Talos, Kenna, and Panoptica; and business risk scoring. 

Business Transaction Mapping 

New business transaction mapping locates how and where an attack may occur within common application workflows like ‘login, checkout, or complete payment’ so that ITOps and SecOps professionals can instantly understand the potential impact to your application and your bottom line.

Threat Intelligence Feeds 

New threat intelligence feeds from Cisco Talos, Kenna, and Panoptica provide valuable risk scores from multiple sources to assess the likelihood of threat exploits

Business Risk Scoring (for Security Risk Prioritization)

New Business risk scoring combines threat and vulnerability intelligence, business impact and runtime behavior to identify the most pressing risks, avoiding delays, and speeding response across teams.

Video Demonstration of the Business Risk Observability use case

See a complete, explanatory demonstration of how a risk index associated to your business transactions allows to discover and remediate vulnerabilities with a proper priority assessment:

https://video.cisco.com/detail/video/6321988561112 

 

Navigating relationships across monitored entities

I have described the Cisco FSO Platform as an extensible, developer friendly platform that can ingest all kinds of telemetry and is able to correlate those data into a meaningful insight.

But... what does it really mean? Some readers told me it's an abstract concept, they don't get how it relates to their daily job in IT Operations.

Let's define telemetry first: it is all the data that you can get from a running system, like a Formula 1 car running on the race track (speed, consumption, temperature, remaining fuel, etc.). Or from your IT systems, that include applications, infrastructure, cloud, network, etc. In this case, data come in the form of Metrics (any number you can measure), Events (something that happened at an instant in time), Logs (information written by a system somewhere) and Traces (description of the execution of a process).

This is the origin of the acronym MELT, that you see written on the walls these days. Everyone is excited by Observability, that is the ability to infer the internal state of the system by looking at its external signals (e.g. collecting MELT). Generally, Observability is realised within a domain: a consistent set of assets of the same type (technologies, devices, or business processes). Example: network monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), etc.

The fun comes when you're able to correlate MELT to investigate the root cause of an issue, or to find spots for optimising either performance or cost, or to demonstrate business stakeholders that all the business KPI are OK thanks to the good job done by the IT Operations folks :-)  

Even better when you're able to correlate MELT across different domains, to extend observability end-to-end. The entire business architecture is under control. You can navigate all the relationships that link the entities that are relevant in your monitoring, and see if any of those is affecting the global outcome (faults, bottlenecks, etc.).

Example: LinkedIn

One illuminating example for this type of navigation is the parallelism with the LinkedIn website, and the exploration of your network of contacts to find a specific person, or information about their professional role, their company, their activity.

Every IT professional I know has a profile on LinkedIn, and each of them generates information: they post articles or photos, they react to others' posts (either repost, or suggest/like them), they advertise events, they update their profile (this can be associated to generating MELT). In addition, everyone is connected to other people, so that you have 1st degree (direct) connections but also 2nd degree connections that you inherit from the 1st degree ones.

Click on the video below to see a graphical representation of the navigation across a network of connections on Linkedin, and the flow of information generated by each one of the people in the network.

Now you can imagine a similar network of logical connections among entities that you monitor with the Full Stack Observability platform. You can explore how they are related to each other, and how every one affects the behaviour and the outcome of the others.

In a typical IT scenario, the entities might be the navigation of a user in the software application that supports a digital service (a Business Transaction), a service, the Kubernetes cluster where the service is running, a K8s node, the server running the node (that might be a VM in the cloud), the network segment to connect to the cloud, the cost of cloud resources, the carbon footprint generated by the infrastructure.

Correlation

All the relationships among the monitored entities are explicitly shown in the user interface, and you can move your focus to another object and inspect it, accessing the current health state, its history, and all the Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces it has generated. This makes extremely easy to understand if an issue detected in one of the entities propagates to others, affecting the way they work.

Also the Health Rules that you can define for one entity could include the evaluation of related entities, so that you roll up warnings and awareness at the top level based on what supporting entities are doing.

 

In this screenshot I've highlighted the list of relationships in the panel on the left side, with a green dashed line. That list continues, so scrolling down you would also see Workloads, Pods, Containers, Hosts, Configurations, Persistent Volume Claims, Ingresses, Load Balancers and Teams (yes, the organisational teams that are responsible for this cluster). The number on each entity type shows how many objects of that type are related to the one (the K8s cluster) that is currently in focus in the central pane.

Though we have information about all the entities in the system, all the objects that are not in direct relationship with the entity in focus are automatically hidden in the list, to remove what we call the "background noise". Showing only what really matters increases focus, and makes the investigation easier. You can click, let's say, on the two Business Transactions (luckily in this example both are in green health state) to see what business processes would be impacted by a problem occurring in this K8s cluster.

Of course, scrolling down we would see in the central panel all the information available about this cluster, including all the MELT it has generated in the time interval under investigation (see the options below).

What I have described in this post is just the basic capabilities of the Cisco FSO Platform. You can find the full detail in the official documentation. 

In next posts, I'll explain the most relevant use cases and the impact that Full Stack Observability can have on your business.