Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Sustainability – Turning Cost Optimization into Carbon Impact: CCO Recommendations Now Power the Carbon Optimizer Dashboard

Overview

Flexera One now automatically exports Cloud Cost Optimization (CCO) Usage Reduction Savings recommendations to Greenpixie for ingestion into the Carbon Optimizer Dashboard, enabling customers to translate cloud cost optimization actions into measurable sustainability outcomes.

Every rightsizing, idle-resource, and usage-reduction recommendation in CCO represents more than a cost-saving opportunity — it represents avoided carbon emissions, electricity consumption, and water usage. Until now, customers could see the financial impact of acting on these recommendations, but had no way to quantify the environmental impact of the same actions.

With this release, CCO Usage Reduction Savings recommendations flow directly into Carbon Optimizer, where Greenpixie's ISO 14064-certified methodology calculates the sustainability impact of each optimization opportunity. This is GreenOps in action: the same recommendation that saves money now also shows customers exactly how much carbon, electricity, and water it saves - at the resource level! 

What Is New

A new data platform job exports CCO Usage Reduction Savings recommendations to Greenpixie for the Carbon Optimizer Dashboard. Customers can now:

• Quantify the sustainability impact of cost optimization actions in three dimensions:
• Carbon savings (mtCO₂e)
• Electricity savings (kWh)
• Water savings (L)
• View sustainability impact across Azure, AWS, and GCP
• Translate every Usage Reduction Savings recommendation into an environmental outcome
• Bring cost and carbon decision-making into a single, unified motion

Why It Matters

Cloud optimization and cloud sustainability have historically lived in separate worlds. FinOps teams act on cost recommendations; sustainability teams report on emissions — often months later, from entirely different data. Customers making real progress on cloud efficiency had no credible way to claim the environmental benefit of that work.

This release closes that gap. By connecting CCO's optimization intelligence to Greenpixie's ISO 14064-certified carbon methodology, Flexera gives customers a defensible, resource-level answer to a question every sustainability leader is being asked: "What is our cloud efficiency work actually doing for our environmental commitments?"

It also deepens the Flexera + Greenpixie partnership, extending it beyond carbon visibility to Cloud Sustainability Impact Intelligence — moving customers from measuring emissions to quantifying the impact of actions.

Customer Value

• One action, two outcomes. The same rightsizing decision that reduces spend now carries quantified benefits in carbon, electricity, and water — no separate analysis, no spreadsheet math.
• Credible sustainability claims. Impact calculations are grounded in Greenpixie's ISO 14064-certified, bottom-up methodology — audit-ready, not spend-based estimates.
• A stronger business case for optimization. FinOps teams can now bring sustainability stakeholders into the optimization conversation, accelerating the adoption of previously stalled recommendations.
• Proven demand. This capability directly supports active customer use cases.

Key Benefits

• Delivers cost-to-sustainability translation for Usage Reduction Savings recommendations
• Enables Carbon Optimizer sustainability impact calculations across all three major clouds
• Strengthens chargeback, showback, and ESG reporting narratives with actionable impact data
• Advances Flexera's Carbon Like Cash vision, treating carbon with the same real-time rigor as cloud spend
• Reinforces Flexera's differentiated position as the only platform linking FinOps action to verified environmental impact

Your collaboration turned a data pipeline into a strategic capability, one that helps every Flexera customer see that optimizing the cloud and protecting the planet are the same motion.

Thank you for making it real.

-Mark

Cloud Sustainability -- Carbon Like Cash - Q1-2026 Release

Team Eco's Q1-2026 release marks another significant step forward in how enterprises manage and enforce cloud carbon accountability. This update introduces four EPICs focused on the Carbon Like Cash principle: real-time budget enforcement that mimics financial cost controls, organizational context that links carbon data to actual business operations, deeper integration of carbon impact into existing cost optimization workflows, and enterprise-grade data access for large-scale sustainability analytics.

🤖 Carbon Budget Enforcement -- A watchdog that oversees and enforces team-level cloud carbon budgets, similar to financial cost controls for real-time carbon accountability.

• Team-level carbon budget engine — Set emission limits for each team, project, or workload (e.g., 10 mtCO₂e per quarter) aligned with organizational structure and net-zero commitments.
• Real-time emissions versus budget dashboard — Live tracking of carbon usage across AWS, Azure, and GCP against budget trajectories, highlighting variance before it becomes a breach.
• Predictive breach detection — Forecast-based alerts that detect when a team is likely to overspend, allowing intervention before the quarter ends.
• Remediation actions — Automated workload management, including pausing idle environments, rescheduling batch jobs to lower-carbon regions, and escalating if no manual response is received.
• Full action log — Maintain an auditable record of all alerts, recommendations, and enforcement actions — supporting ESG disclosure and internal carbon accountability programs.

📊 Carbon Optimizer Dashboard - The double win dashboard: carbon impact and cost optimization in one view, powered by the Carbon Impact Calculation Engine.

•  Carbon Impact Calculation Engine — Transforms existing CCO cost optimization recommendations into quantified carbon and water savings, providing accurate environmental impact metrics for every optimization opportunity. 
• Unified Sustainability + Cost Dashboard — Provides an integrated view showing environmental impact alongside existing CCO cost recommendations, highlighting the combined cost and carbon reduction (double win) for each recommendation at the resource level. 
• Environmental Analytics Platform — Trend analysis, comparative assessment, and performance tracking of carbon impact from cloud optimizations support both operational and executive sustainability reporting. 
• Sustainability Reporting Engine — Executive-level carbon impact summaries, detailed environmental analytics exports, and compliance-ready documentation to facilitate ESG disclosure. 

🗂️ RBD-Based Organizational Contextualization for Power BI - Cloud carbon data mapped to how your business is actually organized — by Country, Business Unit, Department, and Division.

• RBD mapping engine — Contextualizes CCO resource RBD/Tags into organizational dimensions (rbd_country, rbd_business_unit, rbd_department, rbd_division), allowing sustainability data to be filtered according to the same hierarchy used in financial reporting. 
• Multi-level Power BI filtering — Dynamic filters throughout the entire organizational hierarchy (Country → Business Unit → Department → Division), with performance-optimized queries and intuitive drill-down navigation. 
• Automated organizational synchronization — Real-time synchronization of organizational hierarchy from CCO into Cloud Sustainability dashboards; automated onboarding of new organizational units through RBD automation policies. 
• Organizational visualization suite — Geographic heat maps by country, Business Unit comparison matrices, departmental performance dashboards, divisional trend analysis, and hierarchical tree views for drill-down analysis. 
• Contextualized report distribution — Sustainability reports are automatically grouped and distributed based on RBD ownership, such as the country manager receiving the country-level report. 
• Exception handling — Fallback RBD allocation rules for untagged resources, with a validation framework to identify tag gaps and promote tagging hygiene. 

📥 Customer Scheduled Access to Large Datasets -- Enterprise-grade sustainability data export at scale — scheduled, secure, and in the format your analytics stack needs.

• High-performance scheduled download engine — Scalable scheduling system for all types of sustainability data (emissions, electricity, water, costs) with optimized retrieval, smart caching, and support for CSV, JSON, and Parquet formats. 
• Flexible data selection framework — Advanced filtering by cloud provider, region, resource type, date range, and custom dimensions; supports large-scale batch downloads with consistent performance. 
• Customer-managed download platform — Self-service scheduling interface within Flexera One, API endpoints for programmatic schedule management, SDKs and client libraries for automation, and robust error handling with status notifications. 
• Enterprise security and compliance — Authentication and authorization for scheduled downloads, rate limiting, quota management per customer, field-level security for sensitive sustainability data, and comprehensive audit logging. 
• Design partner validated — Developed in collaboration with ABB; architecture validated using real-world data volumes and organizational hierarchy needs of large organizations. 

Fixes & Adjustments

•  RBD synchronization — Stabilized for orgs with high tag churn environments. 
• Power BI filter performance — Improvements for orgs with large organizational hierarchies (Country → Division drill-downs with 10,000+ resources). 
• Scheduled download retry logic — Hardened; improved error messaging for failed jobs. 
• Carbon Impact Calculation Engine — Calibration updated to reflect the latest Greenpixie ISO 14064-certified emissions factors for Q1 2026 

Introducing Guided Onboarding in Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization

Flexera One now includes a Getting Started experience on the landing page for Cloud Cost Optimization (CCO), designed specifically for customers logging in for the first time.

New users are welcomed with guided setup cards that walk them through the essential first steps to quickly configure and begin using CCO.

What’s included?

• Connect Cloud Data - Seamlessly link your cloud accounts so spend and usage data can start flowing into Flexera One.
• Set Up Billing Centers - Define billing groups or cost centers to enable accurate cost allocation and reporting.
• Set Up Custom Tagging - Configure tag-based dimensions to track costs by business unit, project, or environment.

Why this matters

This guided onboarding experience is designed to:

• Accelerate initial setup
• Reduce time to value
• Eliminate the need to navigate multiple settings pages
• Help teams reach meaningful cost insights faster

Learn more: https://docs.flexera.com/flexera-one/cloud/guided-onboarding-experience/

Azure CSP MCA Support – Now Generally Available (GA)

We’re excited to announce General Availability (GA) of Azure CSP MCA billing integration in Flexera One—bringing enhanced transparency, control, and scalability for CSPs and partners managing Azure costs. While the core capabilities are now fully available, a few advanced features remain feature-flagged and can be enabled via Flexera Support.

GA Capabilities

• Seamless Azure Cost Management API integration with costs
• Support for Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans (SP) – Cost and usage visibility
• Commitment inventory (reservations and savings plans) with expiration and utilization details
• Account-level configuration is available for child organizations to display either list price, cost price, or both. By default, both the List Price and Cost columns in the Tabular View and dashboards display list price values. To enable the display of list price and cost price values in their respective columns for specific child organizations, contact Flexera Support.
• L1 Scope: ( Available through UI )
  • Billing Account
  • Billing Profile
  • Customer Tenant
• L2 Scope : Subscription Scoping ( Not Available on UI )

Note for subscription scoping : 

1. Commitment inventory (reservations and savings plans) with expiration and utilization details is not available 
2. Rate reduction savings is not available at the subscription scope for Indirect Resellers because the list price is zero at this scope.

Feature-Flagged (Optional Enablement)

• Savings & Savings % metrics
• Rate Reduction Savings dashboard

Note: Reservations usage is 0 due to MS limitations

Business Outcomes

• Enhanced transparency for CSPs and partners
• Stronger FinOps governance with scoped access
• Reduced data exposure risk (least-privilege model)
• Scalable and flexible billing integration

Product Documentation: https://docs.flexera.com/flexera-one/administration/cloud-settings/bill-data-connections/bill-connect-configurations/microsoft-csp-partner-azure-mca-new/

Please find more about the content of this release in the https://docs.flexera.com/flexera-one/feature-list/new-features-in-2026/march-2026

Azure Tier-2 CSP (Indirect Reseller) Onboarding Support in Flexera One

We’re excited to announce support for Azure Tier-2 Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers, also known as Indirect Resellers, operating under a Modern Commerce Agreement (MCA) through subscription based scoping. This enhancement removes a key onboarding blocker for Tier-2 CSP customers who previously lacked direct access to Azure billing accounts owned by Tier-1 CSPs.

Note: This subscription-level scoping has certain limitations. These limitations are documented and highlighted in the user documentation . https://docs.flexera.com/flexera/EN/Administration/BillConnectConfigsCPSPartnerAzureMCA_CostAPI.htm#cloudsettings_3241311028_1213876

Capability

Flexera One now enables onboarding of Azure Tier-2 CSP customers without requiring access to a Tier-1 CSP billing account.

• Support for Azure customers purchasing through a Tier-2 CSP (Indirect Reseller) under MCA
• Subscription-level scoping mechanism
• Ingestion of Azure billing exports without a billing account ID
• Accurate visibility into Azure spend at the customer subscription level

Benefits & Outcomes

• Eliminates onboarding dependency on Tier-1 CSP billing access
• Expands Azure support coverage for MSP and Indirect Reseller models
• Improves visibility into Azure spend for Tier-2 CSP customers
• Enables effective cost management, optimization, and savings tracking
• Accelerates time to value for Azure customers under MCA

Product Documentation:

• Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Partner - Azure MCA (New)
• Connecting Azure MCA Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Partner Billing
• Flexera One now supports Azure Tier-2 CSP (Indirect Reseller) MCA billing export ingestion