⚙️Cybersecurity and sustainability do share a complex relationship! 

The two approaches share commonalities, such as grappling with resistance from teams and executives and prioritizing resilience, but they also seem to split in notable ways such as constant updates in cybersecurity impacting bloatware and equipment obsolences. 

🎧In this episode Gaël Duez invited two experts on the field, Mary Prokhorova from InDevLab and Michael Oghia from Datacenter Changemakers, to discuss the nuances of cybersecurity and sustainability’s relationship.

🔎Some few takeaways from their conversation are:

💡the critical role of IT infrastructure in modern business processes

💡importance of protecting critical infrastructure to avoid environmental damage and societal impacts

💡significance of investing in digital infrastructure to support the green revolution and highlighting the impact of climate risks on both physical and digital security

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Gaël Duez 00:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO with Gaël Duez. That's me. Green IO is the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Because access and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes both on your podcast platform and on our website greenio.tech, cybersecurity and sustainability it has been a while since I decided to have a dedicated episode on the complex relationship between the two. On one hand, the two approaches share some common features, such as not always. Being an easy sell to teams or. Executives, or their common emphasis on resiliency. On the other end, there are some areas where they seem to go the opposite direction. Security requires regular updates, having an impact on both bloatware and equipment obsolescence, resident equipment increases the environmental footprint of infrastructure, and so on. Quite a lot to cover in this episode, so I wanted to bring two experts on board, Mary and Michael, with different angles of approach. Mary Prokhorova is the founder and CEO of InDevLab and also the co-founder of Servi5, which is specialized in cybersecurity products. She's based in Ukraine, where she can unfortunately experience firsthand and on a daily basis the vital importance of cybersecurity. Mary has a specialized education in software design and development and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in software and cybersecurity. So right on the spot with our topic. Michael Oghia is a consultant, editor, and ICT sustainability advocate working within the digital infrastructure, internet governance, and media development ecosystem, currently as a Partnerships Manager & Co-producer, at Datacenter Changemakers at Datacenter Forum. In a nutshell, he knows a lot about sustainability, infrastructure, and resiliency. And a fun fact, he was one of the first persons I connected to almost three years ago when I started my journey into sustainability. It was obvious to me that I wanted him on the show at some point and voilà. Better late than never. Welcome both of you to the show. Thanks a lot, Mary. Thanks a lot, Michael, for joining Green IO today.

Michael J. Oghia 02:40

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me, and indeed, it's been a long time coming, so I'm very grateful to finally be here with you.

Mary Prokhorova 02:52

Yeah, thank you. Nice to meet you all.

Gaël Duez 02:55

Okay, so to start maybe unwrapping all the different topics, Mary, what do you think about the parallel I draw between cybersecurity strategy and sustainability strategy not always being the top priority and the way teams will handle it? It's important, but it's obviously less important than delivering or providing new features or whatever. Can you comment on this? Do you agree? Because you've got a lot of experience with different companies, is it something that you've noticed also or not that much? 

Mary Prokhorova 03:29

Of course, I agree. I think that cybersecurity will be a part of sustainability. The main focus will be on sustainability, sustainability for a working model, for general organization development, and general impact on this world. I mean, not only like ecological impact, I mean like something more that organization could bring to our people. Maybe it's also mind-changing. It's also focusing on more important things for our nature. But the general sustainability will also based on security tools. If we are talking about sustainability, for example, for critical infrastructure, if we are talking about electric station or about heatric electric station, we're also about talking about how it works with IT infrastructure. And do we have a risk if something breaks from IT infrastructure, this infrastructure still works and will have not any ecological strategy for nature. It's, for example, from my side, from my experience, I have situations when cybersecurity and it infrastructure have a very big impact on manufacturing. In this part of Europe. We have a lot of manufacturing that work, for example, with windows, with plastic, with different tips. And the station was next something went wrong in infrastructure. And all this manufacturing was stopped. I mean, logistics was stopped, and production was stopped. A lot of plastic was broken. And do you know how much plastic they need to utilisate more than one ton per day? So you understand how much trouble it is for nature and you don't know how to reduce this plastic. So it's also about how infrastructure could and cybersecurity could influence to general production and general ecological questions.

Michael J. Oghia 06:14

I completely agree with Mary's point there, and I wanted to say something very similar in my remarks throughout this episode as well, that there are many different ways that we can kind of paint this argument. Where is the intersection between cybersecurity and sustainability? And one of them that Mary just mentioned is very prominent, which is that if you are a, whether it is a business or a factory if you are s