Over the past few weeks I’ve discussed agility enablers such as virtualization and unified communications (UC). We find both technologies are also seen as green IT enablers: Virtualization reduces data center power/cooling demands through consolidation and UC facilitates virtual workers (reduced travel) through presence, collaboration, Web conferencing and telepresence. So, what about virtualized security and virtual security engineers?

The most quantifiable green move is consolidation of physical boxes: FW, IDS/IPS, and anti-malware appliances into one physical device. There are three options. First, multiple virtual security appliances may be run on one virtual server. Of course, your security vendor must have a virtual appliance, and there can be significant challenges to maintaining performance. A second option is a purpose-built security platform, such as Crossbeam’s X-Series, to maintain performance, but at the price of lesser green benefit. And, then a third option is single vendor unified threat management (UTM) solutions; many of which are now marketed as being “green.”

For every watt-hour reduction we estimate three watt-hours shaved off the electric bill (less power loss and reduced cooling power). If we assume 150 watt-hours (this is low) as the average physical security appliance load, and a company has 50 devices, that’s 7.5 kWh of total power. Consolidating at a 10:1 ratio onto a purpose-built security platform (800 watt-hour) results in 4 kWh of power; a 47% reduction. The end-result is annual savings of 91.98 mWh ((3.5 kWh x 3) x 24 x 365). Reduced power means reduced carbon footprint and at an estimated $0.13/kWh there’s an annual greenback savings of about $11,950/year.

For staff, UC (collaboration, presence, integrated messaging, telepresence) reduces security operations environmental footprint and costs. Today, many companies we work with setup their security engineers to remotely log-in to the SOC from home. Usually, this is for off-hours support; the engineers still come into the office daily. To get true green benefit we need to keep the engineers off the road. Nemertes finds almost 90% of IT executives say their organization has virtual workers: Workers who are physically separated from their managers, co-workers and/or immediate reports. With proper security measures, there is no reason why a security engineer can’t be a virtual worker. Sure, there will always need to be some staffing on-site and there will be times that virtual work is impossible. But, the majority of the daily security operations can be extended out through secure collaboration via functions, such as web conferencing, telepresence and integrated messaging. Even if workers come in one day per week, their environmental footprint shrinks by 80% - a reduction of up to 3.15 tons of pollutants per year/worker (based on a 30 mile round-trip commute).

The bottom line is consolidation of security products and enablement of virtual security workers can be a significant green contributor to your organization’s sustainability efforts. These are just two examples of green security. I’ll be discussing a third next week - green forensics.