Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity covers the practices, procedures and technologies protecting information systems against unauthorised access, data leakage and malicious attack.
Convergence with sustainable IT
Security is usually treated separately from environmental concerns. The two meet on several points.
Data not retained cannot leak. The minimisation required by data protection law simultaneously reduces the attack surface and the volume stored. Dormant data combines both defects: it costs to store and constitutes a risk if compromised.
A compromised system consumes. Clandestine mining, spam relaying, participation in an attack network: a hijacked machine works for someone else using its owner's energy.
Security conditions reuse. Without a reliable data erasure procedure, organisations destroy working equipment as a precaution rather than refurbishing it.
Where they conflict
Encryption, logging, redundancy and backups consume resources. The trade-off is made case by case according to actual criticality, not by principle.
