In this opinion piece, Suid Adeyanju, CEO of RiverSafe, looks at the complex balance between growing cybersecurity demands and their environmental impact and suggests ways to reduce your carbon footprint.
He highlights the huge energy and water consumption of data centers, which will strengthen cyber defenses that will only get stronger due to the proliferation of cybercrime threats.
In addition to raising awareness of this growing environmental issue, Adeyanju also suggests sustainable strategies and urges organizations to adopt eco-friendly cybersecurity solutions. This article serves as an important call to action to merge digital security and environmental responsibility.
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How cybersecurity impacts the environment
Cybercrime is a huge threat to any business operating today. But that’s not the only danger we have to worry about.
Cybercrime tends to harm companies £8.2 trillion ($10.5 trillion) per year by 2025 — up from £2.3 trillion ($3 trillion) in 2015.
Technological developments such as AI and the increasing opportunities presented by the ongoing digital transformation are making attacks against businesses of all sizes more complex, more frequent, and more damaging.
Building a strong cybersecurity posture is essential if your organization wants to protect itself from costly incidents such as malware attacks, phishing, and data breaches. But so is protecting our environment.
The engines that keep the wheels of cloud technology turning are far less visible than on-site servers, and the environmental impact of cloud computing is often hidden out of sight and out of mind. It may feel like this. But cloud security solutions can’t be run on pixie dust.
While essential to today’s digital world, it’s no secret that huge data centers running cybersecurity applications, platforms, and services consume large amounts of energy and water.
Data centers collectively use around 3% of the world’s electricity, which is expected to rise to 8% by 2030 as a result of increased demand and digital usage. Additionally, the average hyperscale may use up to 5 million gallons of water each day through its cooling system.
Resources come in and greenhouse gases come out. And as the arms race intensifies between organizations trying to protect themselves and cybercriminals looking to exploit them, the carbon footprint of cybersecurity technology will only increase.
So how can you ensure that you protect your virtual assets in an effective and sustainable way while minimizing damage to the environment?
How to reduce your cybersecurity carbon footprint
Striking a sustainable balance between tight digital security and the potential impact these cybersecurity operations have on the planet is difficult, but to reduce the carbon footprint of cybersecurity efforts There are steps organizations can take.
Move your security solution to the cloud
Although cloud computing involves high resource consumption, cloud computing is a much more sustainable option. 98% more energy efficientIn fact, it’s better than running an on-premises solution.
So if your business is still running legacy cybersecurity solutions from its own servers, it’s time to move them to the cloud to take advantage of smarter features and greater scalability. There is a possibility.
Although today’s data centers operate at scale, efforts have been underway for years to make data centers more climate-friendly in their design. Leading CSPs are making great strides in building more efficient data centers, using less resources through the use of renewable energy, server optimization, virtualization, and advanced cooling techniques.
Google, Microsoft, and AWS are all committed to powering 75% of their data centers with renewable energy by 2025 and plan to be completely carbon neutral by 2030.
Collaborate with vendors committed to sustainability
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues are of increasing concern to modern businesses. Consumers want to know that the companies they work with are ethical and keep concerns such as the climate crisis in mind when developing products and services.
The cybersecurity industry is no exception, with a growing number of solution providers putting sustainability front and center and aiming to be transparent about what their companies are doing to offset their impact on the world. .
Adding this type of environmental responsibility to your list of criteria when choosing cybersecurity products can make a big difference.
For example, Splunk has outlined a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and recently launched the cross-functional Splunk Sustainability Collaborative to help achieve that goal. Look for vendors who are committed to taking positive and concrete action on climate change.
Use smarter data storage
Many of the main pillars of cybersecurity, such as SIEM and UEBA, work by analyzing vast amounts of data to detect potential threats and anomalies. The larger an organization’s digital footprint, the more data these platforms must process, collate, and scrutinize.
That data has to go somewhere. And many of them must be stored securely for a period of time to comply with data regulations and privacy laws.
Data storage is Main sources of average energy consumption in data centers. There’s a lot you can do to optimize data collection and storage, which is good news for businesses looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their cybersecurity operations.
The cost of cloud storage and its relative energy consumption depends on how much access you need to your data. If you are willing to put your data on a higher virtual shelf, so to speak, it may take a little longer to access it, but it will consume fewer resources to store.
Performing regular data audits is a good way to maintain data hygiene and ensure that your data is not consuming more resources than necessary. Remove duplicates, review storage levels to see if data can be archived in a more efficient way, and develop lifecycle policies to ensure unnecessary data is removed.
Rethinking e-waste
Cybersecurity applications and services themselves can run in the cloud, but teams need to be able to access them through high-quality hardware and devices. This is especially true if you’re looking to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint by offering remote work.
These devices cannot be used forever, and what to do with all the e-waste they produce is a pressing environmental issue. Currently, the processing of electronic waste generates approximately 18 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Prevention is always better than cure, so you can reduce the impact of e-waste by choosing devices designed to be more environmentally friendly.
Things to look out for include low power consumption, the use of recyclable or biodegradable materials, and vendors who help you dispose of old or broken technology responsibly through reuse or repurposing whenever possible. This includes planning, etc.
Like many things in our lives today, cybersecurity is essential despite its impact on the environment. The threat of cybercrime and the damage it can cause is too great to put security on the back burner, but there are steps we can all take to make our cybersecurity operations more environmentally friendly. There is.
And with these increasingly green cybersecurity solutions, we can better protect our planet, the precious resources we depend on, and the organizations that protect them.
About the author
Prior to co-founding RiverSafe in 2010, Suid Adeyanju worked as an information security consultant in various organizations in the private and public sectors, initially providing services in the network security field and later in security incident and event management (SIEM) technology. I specialized in.
Suid has 15 years’ experience working on large scale security projects for blue-chip companies such as Thomson Reuters, BP, BAA and TfL.
Suid is also committed to promoting a more balanced and diverse workforce. He regularly speaks on diversity and sustainability issues and is dedicated to driving positive change in the industry.
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