Sustainability
Protection into Practice
If you’re a decision-maker within any organisation, it’s clear that sustainability will be an ever-increasing priority as companies race to decarbonise and build more robust operating models. A healthy Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy shouldn’t come at the expense of commercial success, quite the opposite.
As our industry continues to grow, both in market capitalisation and influence to address global challenges, the role of IT within sustainability will expand in an attempt to marry commercial success with long-term resilience. With this growth comes adjacent challenges: how do we secure the assets which we’ve come to rely upon so much, and how do we maintain operational efficiency in the face of a global scale-up? Whilst these sound like technical challenges, simply put, ESG comes down to just long-term risk management.
Stripping out the ‘E’ from ESG, we usually speak about ‘environments’ from an ecological perspective; for example, how we lessen the impact we have on the natural world. Looking now to a world where most of what we do has undergone some, if not a significant degree of digitisation, the environments that we must protect are the digital ecosystems which, as a species, we fundamentally rely upon.
An organisation that doesn’t protect its data or intellectual property is not a sustainable one. With an increasing number of threats across the cyber security landscape, and an exponentially growing attack surface as the result of more opaque connected devices, we must do more to protect our ecosystems from both the inside and out. In 2021, over 85% of data breaches were the result of human error1, something that we can attempt to reduce with authentication, access control, authorisation, and auditing, coupled with ‘secure by design’ data encryption and network security; but clearly this isn’t enough.
The risks presented within the cybersphere quickly spill into commercial environments where data breaches are now costing companies on average $4.35M per incident2. These attacks carry not only a financial cost, but can cause substantial operational and reputational damage, with specific industries including healthcare, financial services, and energy being amongst the most targeted3. Addressing security as part of a holistic sustainability strategy is not insurmountable. Bringing governance - including data privacy and security – into the crosshairs of the CIO is the first step in identifying risks - emerging and existing, and how the wrong security posturing could be inadvertently exposing an organisation to damages, regulatory or otherwise.
As organisations continually assess commercial risks in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world we’re living in, it’s now more important than ever to have the right fundamentals and underpinnings to support resilience and security in the face of these fast-paced changes and expectations.
Across the IT sector, we’re seeing more businesses investing in the core technologies that will support secure and scalable growth. For many, this includes some kind of cloud transition or the ability to access hyperscaler environments which carry bigger budgets and range of sustainable services.
The old adage of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ no longer applies to sustainability where supply chains and customer activities are under increased scrutiny, especially when considering emission allocations accounting for incumbent Scope 3 reporting. For organisations wishing to decommission their data centers in pursuit of scalable cloud strategies, there are considerable gains to be made in the reduction of direct energy consumption. These savings, whilst good on paper, simply move some of the carbon implications from Scope 2 (indirect energy used) to Scope 3 (supply chain). The good news here is that the big 3 hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP are rapidly decarbonising which in turn, passes on less carbon-intensive services to their customers.
The hyperscalers are under the same pressures as your organisation, which is to secure sustainable scalability through investments in core technical underpinnings, aided by investments in renewable energy and more efficient processes. Large budgets and ever-increasing computing power mean that a cloud strategy is not only a driver for operational efficiency but will help in reducing Scope 3 emissions for their downstream organisations. The efficiency of scale in which these environments can adapt mean that with the right configuration, the cloud can be a key driver in a data-heavy business to reach near and long-term sustainability targets.
Being resilient presents near and longer-term challenges, and these will be unique to each business. Some organisations will be prioritising Scope 3 decarbonisation in line with national legislation, whilst others will be focusing on the protection of data and security, plus everything in between. Our organisation can help you understand where technology can make the greatest impact on your sustainability journey, coupling pragmatic advice with carbon neutral capabilities engineered for long-term resilience.