Technology perspective: Is green IT a threat to IT security?

Abstract

Industries are pushed by the regulations to reduce the CO2 footprint of their production lines. According to the latest statistics 3% of the CO2 footprint is generated by the IT industry. Currently a high percentage of the information being accessed by the users is produced and managed centrally. With the growth of data generation by users, e.g. social networking and YouTube websites, the storing and managing of the data will demand more energy on the networks. One of the solutions to reduce the energy consumption in ICT is introduced by virtualisation technology. While virtualisation can help to reduce the energy consumption, it has introduced other complexities to the environment, such as scalability, resource management, security and management. This paper focuses on the security issues created by the use of virtualisation technology which is being promoted to make computing Green. We also aim to highlight the system vulnerabilities which are a direct result of pushing computing to become greener by using virtualisation technology. We discuss the research challenges and directions needed to be further investigated in this field. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.