Sustainable IT is not a side project. It is becoming a core requirement.

Sustainability has arrived in the IT department. Not as a philosophical aspiration, but as a practical obligation with reporting requirements, procurement implications, and boardroom attention attached. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) now requires large European organisations to disclose their environmental impact in detail — and digital infrastructure is a material part of that picture.

For security leaders and IT directors, this creates a new dimension to decisions that were previously made on purely technical or commercial grounds. The energy consumption of your network infrastructure, the lifecycle of your hardware, the sustainability credentials of your vendors — all of it is now potentially in scope for ESG reporting and stakeholder scrutiny.

The environmental footprint of IT infrastructure

Data centres account for roughly 1–2% of global electricity consumption, a figure that is rising steadily as cloud adoption, AI workloads, and always-on connectivity increase demand. Network infrastructure — routers, switches, firewalls, wireless access points — adds meaningfully to that total, particularly in organisations with large distributed estates across campuses, branches, and remote sites.

The security stack itself is not exempt. Next-generation firewalls, dedicated security appliances, on-premise SIEM infrastructure, and legacy hardware running well past its intended lifespan all contribute to an organisation's energy footprint. Many organisations have never mapped this systematically — they know their data centre power draw, but the distributed security and network estate is often unaccounted for.

Hardware lifecycle is a related and often underestimated issue. Equipment that is retained beyond its optimal operational life typically consumes more energy per unit of performance than modern equivalents. It also tends to fall out of vendor support, creating security exposure at the same time as environmental inefficiency — a combination that is difficult to justify in either direction.

"The most sustainable piece of hardware is often the one you do not need to buy — but the second most sustainable is the one that is modern, efficient, and properly managed rather than running indefinitely past its useful life."

Procurement and the supply chain dimension

Beyond operational energy consumption, sustainable IT increasingly requires scrutiny of the supply chain. Where is equipment manufactured? What are the labour and environmental standards of the vendors you buy from? What happens to hardware at end of life — is it properly recycled, or does it end up in landfill?

These questions are moving from voluntary best practice into regulatory expectation. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) places obligations on large organisations to assess and address sustainability risks across their value chains, including technology procurement. For organisations subject to these requirements, vendor selection is no longer purely a technical and commercial exercise.

The major network and security vendors have made varying degrees of progress on sustainability commitments — carbon neutrality targets, circular economy programmes, take-back schemes for end-of-life equipment. Understanding where your current vendors stand, and factoring that into procurement decisions, is becoming a standard part of responsible IT management.

Managed services and the efficiency argument

One dimension of sustainable IT that does not always receive the attention it deserves is the efficiency case for consolidation. Organisations running fragmented security estates — multiple point products, overlapping tools, underutilised appliances — typically have a larger environmental footprint than those running a rationalised, well-managed stack.

Transitioning to managed security services can contribute to this rationalisation. Shared infrastructure, higher utilisation rates, modern hardware operated at scale, and the elimination of redundant on-premise appliances all reduce the per-organisation footprint. It is not the primary reason most organisations make the move — cost efficiency and access to expertise tend to lead the conversation — but it is a genuine co-benefit worth acknowledging.

Making sustainability practical for IT teams

For most IT and security teams, the challenge is translating broad sustainability goals into something actionable within their specific domain. A few starting points tend to be productive.

Map your infrastructure footprint

Before you can manage the environmental impact of your IT estate, you need to understand it. An infrastructure assessment that includes age, energy consumption, utilisation rates, and support status gives you the baseline. It also typically surfaces a number of assets that are overdue for refresh on purely technical grounds — sustainability and security arguments often align.

Build sustainability into procurement criteria

Vendor sustainability credentials, product energy efficiency ratings, and end-of-life programmes can be incorporated into procurement frameworks without adding significant complexity. Nomios consulting regularly helps organisations build these criteria into their vendor evaluation processes, ensuring that sustainability considerations sit alongside security, performance, and cost.

Consider the full lifecycle

Hardware refresh decisions that account for total cost of ownership — including energy costs over the asset lifetime — frequently look different from decisions based on capital cost alone. Modern equipment is often more energy-efficient by a margin that meaningfully offsets the capital investment, particularly in high-density or always-on environments. Professional services teams that model lifecycle costs as part of infrastructure design work tend to surface these trade-offs naturally.

A differentiator worth claiming

Sustainability is still relatively uncommon as a topic in security vendor content. Most MSSPs and integrators do not address it directly. For Nomios, it represents a genuine differentiator — not because the company has solved every sustainability challenge, but because it is willing to have an honest conversation about it and help clients navigate the practical implications.

Organisations that are building sustainability into their IT strategy — whether driven by CSRD obligations, investor expectations, or their own commitments — benefit from working with partners who take the topic seriously. That conversation is one Nomios is ready to have.