I was reading a book by Vex King on Good Vibes: Good Life. In one of the chapters, he mentioned chaos theory and the butterfly effect, which says that even a tiny difference in the initial parameters changes the outcome to a large extent. For example, based on this theory, even how the butterfly flapped its wings in the amazon could cause weather changes in some parts of North America. Though that point is debatable, one can’t refute the fact that nature has its way when it comes to healing herself. When comparing that with the growth of data and its computation requirements, we need to look at it from an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) perspective, concentrating on carbon-friendly IT strategies.

In the recent thought leadership session, Greg Clark, Director of SaaS Product Management, Cybersecurity, explored the topic of “Data Security and Sustainability” focusing on accelerating innovation and containing costs while supporting Green IT initiatives.

This blog series covers how the Voltage suite of products helps organizations move towards Green IT by applying the Privacy by Design approach to data.

What Are Sustainability and ESG, and Why Are They Needed?

Sustainability is a societal goal related to people’s ability to safely co-exist on Earth over a long time. Sustainability is commonly described as having three dimensions (or pillars): environmental, economic, and social.

Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is a framework designed to be embedded into an organization's strategy that considers the needs and ways in which to generate value for all the organizational stakeholders, such as employees, customers, suppliers, and investors.

What Is OpenText’s Role in Sustainability and Data Privacy?

OpenText helps customers and businesses with their Green IT initiatives by understanding their ever-increasing data, and how it can bring value to them and their businesses. OpenText privacy products and solution not only helps customers to build their applications in line with compliance and regulatory requirements but also can help organizations to build better strategies focusing on ESG.

Our goal is to help customers and partners meet their ESG requirements by implementing carbon-friendly IT strategies that deliver greater efficiency and extend the life of their existing technology with low-carbon solutions.

How Do Our Privacy Products and Solutions Enable Sustainable Green Projects?

As data is the core element of organizations that defines their business strategies, there are challenges, such as assessing risk, assigning business purpose to data, handling data ethically, and being in a better position from a privacy posture standpoint. The Privacy by Design approach enables organizations to build an inventory of classified data, list who has access to those data, and how the customer can modify or delete their data.

Privacy by design can be enabled by the products and tools which employ Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) designed to improve privacy by reducing the amount of personal data collected and shared. These technologies include PII detection, de-identification, anonymization, and data minimization techniques. PET aims to reduce the risk of personal data being used or misused in ways that could harm the user if not handled ethically.

Another part of the privacy by design approach includes Privacy-Preserving Technology (PPT) which protects the value of the data and balances the risk associated with managing, handling, and processing sensitive data through de-identification techniques, encryption, and data masking techniques. This not only helps organizations in responsible and sustainable personal data usage but also facilitates organizations to leverage the protected data to analyze data for its type, trends, minimization and look for competitive advantage and business innovation.  

Our next blog will explore how this approach minimizes energy consumption and enables organizations towards Green IT.

More Resources:

See how Voltage supports carbon-friendly strategies for its customers in our new climate change white paper. 

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