Top Cyber Industry Defenses Spike CO2 Emissions

Top Cyber Industry Defenses Spike CO2 Emissions, with the study identifying two cybersecurity areas as responsible for about 45% of the sector’s climate impact. The No. 1 environmentally harmful category is resilience, meaning backup servers and systems, which contributed approximately 29% of the studied organisations’ cyber climate impact. The next largest is IAM, at 16%, driven in part by hardware tokens and the proliferation of multiple identity systems in large organisations.

According to Gérôme Billois, cybersecurity and digital trust partner at Wavestone, the findings suggest that consolidating IAM systems and reducing unnecessary log retention could help cut emissions without raising risk, and that virtual desktops for contractors can also lower power use.

The piece also notes that, while encryption remains efficient, other measures like backups remain the biggest challenge to decarbonising cyber security, and it offers practical steps such as avoiding duplicate data copies and assessing log collection practices.