Recognising how cybersecurity and sustainability are intertwined is key to progressing towards a more secure , digitally capable and sustainable environment in which to operate . Oseloka Obiora , CTO , RiverSafe , suggests five ways cybersecurity companies can reduce their environmental impact .

he threat posed

Attacks are only getting larger , smarter and more damaging . As a result , organisations must update their strategies to reflect today ’ s threat landscape and invest in their cybersecurity posture . But at the same time , society is dealing with a more tangible peril : the climate

Oseloka Obiora , CTO , RiverSafe crisis . As we watch the devastating consequences of climate change mount , we ’ re all searching for ways to live and work more sustainably .

These two equally crucial objectives may seem irreconcilable : more cybersecurity muscle requires more energy usage . But like almost every other industry on the planet , cybersecurity is evolving and creating new ways to achieve its vital goals while minimising its impact on the environment .

Protection at a cost

There ’ s no doubt that cybersecurity is an essential pursuit . As we shift to smarter and more renewable energy sources , cybersecurity is an increasingly critical part of making sure the infrastructure that underpins it is protected , along with the people who depend on it .

But as a high-performance computing task , cybersecurity itself comes with a cost . It requires energy to operate and hardware to run on , and that generates harmful emissions .

Moving away from traditional serverbased operations and adopting cloudrun solutions is certainly a step in the right direction . According to research by Microsoft , cloud computing is a massive

93 % more energy-efficient than using onpremise data centres and creates 98 % lower emissions .

That ’ s not to say the data centres that power cloud computing can ’ t be made more sustainable , however . Currently accounting for around 3 % of the planet ’ s electricity , data centre energy usage is set to rise to 8 % by 2030 , as we continue to digitally transform our world .

Many major cloud vendors are working to get ahead of this increase in resource consumption by switching to renewable energy sources . The top three data centre operators in the world – Google , Microsoft and AWS – have all committed to powering their data centres with 100 % renewable energy in the next few years .

Three of Google ’ s data centres are already run using more than 90 % carbon-free energy . Microsoft is going a step further , aiming to use 100 % renewable energy by 2025 and for all its data centres to be carbon-negative , water-positive and zero-waste by 2030 . AWS already powers 85 % of its operations with renewable energy and plans to hit 100 % by 2025 .

Data centres also guzzle vast amounts of water , pumped through cooling systems to prevent overheating . The average data

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