The concept of going green is targeting the IT security world too; just because you have to deal with viruses and Trojans and other malware all day long does not mean you should disregard the environment. Representatives from different security software companies have different views regarding this issue.

Richard Stiennon, CEO of Seccom Global, believes that UTM (short for unified threat management) appliances are green because a large number of features are provided by one box, thus cutting the necessity for multiple boxes. This is environmentally friendly because less energy is used, but the thing is that it is not the best security solution for every company.

"While power and heat saving may be something enterprises start to push vendors on, the primary requirement for security devices - blocking threats - will always take precedence," says Stiennon.

Richard Bejtlich works with General Electric as a director of incident response and, according to him, when an incident occurs he must get IT security specialists on the scene as quickly as possible. This can sometimes mean having to fly them from one part of the world to another, which is not exactly environmentally friendly especially since there are software solutions that allow remote assistance.

"Rather than have the carbon footprint of a plane trip, we can instead focus on moving the data we need (for incident response) instead of moving the people," says Bejtlich. For this exact reason one could resort to using F-Response, a software solution that allows an IT expert to do his job from a remote location (perform forensics, recover data, eDiscovery).

Another way of cutting back on emissions is to cut transportation altogether by not forcing your employees to come to work.

Richard Bejtlich again: "We encourage people to work from home so they don't waste energy on travel. The incident response team is all over the world anyway, so we really don't need to be in an office. Doing the job virtually makes budgetary sense, we spend more time getting the work done, and the bonus is it lowers our carbon footprint."

The simple truth of the matter is that no matter what we do, our actions have a direct impact on the world around us; whether we leave a computer running when it need not be, or we go half way across the world to address an IT security issue, using an application such as F-Response would be much more cost efficient and much more environmentally friendly. For IT security specialists going green not only shows respect for the environment, it is also cost efficient.