The Future of Sustainability Requires Protecting Important Data Everywhere

While it might seem initially abstract, sustainability and data security are symbiotic. Allow me to explain. Regardless of the action or industry, critical data touches everything. Whether data is being used in pharmaceutical research, financial records, or intellectual property, securing it is the common imperative. This is especially true as it moves through various access points, the cloud, applications, the web, and various other transactions.  

Protecting data has a lot more to do with sustainability than it might seem. Consider the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #9: evolving industry, innovation, and infrastructure. This SDG references “promoting sustainable industries, and investing in scientific research and innovation, are all important ways to facilitate sustainable development.” To properly support these industries and activities we need to have clean, secure data to ensure this development work is feasible, accurate and safe. Today’s innovators—as well as tomorrow’s— rely on inherent or implied data protection, and also secure data collection and capture.

That data is ever more at risk in a hyper-connected world. Statistically, cybercrime is outpacing the economic burden of environmental disasters year over year. What does this mean for the progress of infrastructure and innovation? Every resource spent on a data breach, is one less asset focused on critical work in these development areas.  And, if recent White House cybersecurity strategy, or the updated plans in the UK are indicators, the onus for storing and securing data rests in the hands of the private sector. 

Of course not everyone is a data expert, and this is emphatically my point: it’s the role of specialized companies, such as Netskope, to help organizations secure their data from anywhere, on any premise (or lack thereof). For the sake of our society at large, we want specialists focused on what they do best: solving grand challenges, be it access to clean water, climate change, furthering the circular economy, solving the global food shortage, finding life saving cures to disease, or building the latest astrophysical telescope.

Netskope is proud to participate in Vision 2045: an initiative aimed to raise awareness on private industry’s role in sustainability. In this video, Netskope experts examine how cybersecurity and data protection are intrinsically linked to sustainability. We invite you to watch the video here, and to learn more about how data security is paramount to a more sustainable future.