Shrink Your Data’s Carbon Footprint with Cyera

How to use DSPM to meet your environmental goals

Data is one of the fastest growing resources in the world. It’s estimated that in 2025, the world will produce over 180 zettabytes of data, or roughly one byte for every star in the universe. Storing and processing all that data uses up a lot of energy. As of 2022, cloud data centers accounted for 2 percent of global electricity demand and about 1.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s basically the size of the entire airline industry, or the whole nation of Canada.

And it’s going to get worse. By 2030, data centers will gobble up 3.7 percent of global electricity usage. Artificial intelligence will be a major contributor to the growth of the cloud’s carbon footprint. According to a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency, a query to OpenAI’s ChatGPT consumes ten times as much electricity as a typical Google search. At nine billion search requests per year, fully integrating AI into every search platform would require about ten TWh of additional electricity production annually. And according to OpenAI, the cost of training large language models will continue to increase, at least for the foreseeable future.

When it comes to AI, an expanding carbon footprint is just the icing on a cake that includes the costs of training AI models, securing AI systems, and ensuring compliance with various data privacy and data sovereignty laws. Fortunately, Cyera can help organizations optimize their AI deployments safely and securely, all while minimizing the carbon emissions associated with those efforts. To see how, we need to understand the connection between data minimization and carbon emissions, and why Cyera’s DSPM beats out the competition when it comes to streamlining your data estate.

Minimize This!

Data minimization is an integral part of any organization’s data governance strategy. For one thing, it’s a central pillar of important data privacy laws like the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Businesses need to be able to demonstrate that they are not collecting or retaining more data than necessary to fulfill legitimate business needs.

And minimization is also important because it helps businesses and governments shrink their attack surfaces, reducing the likelihood that they’ll suffer a material breach. Finally, it’s just fiscally prudent. At around 2 cents per gigabyte per month, large organizations with many petabytes of data are spending tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on data storage. To the extent a lot of that data is redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT), that’s just money down the drain.

Or should we say up in smoke? Storing one petabyte of data for one year takes 300,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, and produces almost 240 metric tons of carbon dioxide. It’s no wonder that many organizations are sounding the alarm about how cloud computing and AI are hampering our efforts to reduce pollution and curb climate change.

This is where Cyera comes in. Many of our customers have discovered that deploying Cyera’s DSPM often pays for itself just in terms of reduced data storage costs. Some customers are seeing savings of between $20,000 and $100,000 per month! That’s one to five petabytes of ROT data we’ve helped them eliminate, and with it anywhere from 240 to 2800 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year!

It Pays to Go Green

Making a demonstrable commitment to reducing your carbon footprint brings a host of benefits. Customers and other stakeholders often put a premium on environmental sustainability, so pointing to concrete emissions reductions can help organizations enhance their brand reputation and customer loyalty.

Moreover, organizations in some sectors may even be able to monetize their emissions reductions to realize further cost savings. For example, industrial manufacturers and energy suppliers in California participate in that state’s Cap-and-Trade Program, where “allowances” to emit carbon dioxide must be purchased at auction each year. Each allowance lets a company produce one metric ton of carbon dioxide, and currently they sell for about $40 a piece.

The European Union has its own emissions trading system (ETS) that also includes energy suppliers and industrial manufacturers, as well as airlines and maritime transport companies. Allowances under the ETS are even more expensive than in California, averaging about €75 ($80) per year. So on top of the $240,000 to $1.2 million many Cyera customers are already saving on data storage, those in certain regulated industries may be able to realize anywhere from around $10,000 to $225,000 more in reduced expenditures for carbon allowances.

Moving Fast without Breaking Things

Cyera is a data security grand slam. It enhances security by reducing the organization’s attack surface, promotes compliance by facilitating data governance and minimization efforts, reduces data storage costs, and as we’ve just seen, it enables organizations to demonstrate and document their commitment to sustainable innovation.

Balancing competitive demands with compliance requirements and environmental goals can be tricky, but with Cyera, organizations can forge ahead with new AI tools and products, knowing that they’re doing so in the most cost effective and environmentally friendly way possible.

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