Security and energy consumption

For good reasons there is a lot of talk about the IT industry´s need for energy and all the measures that can be taken to limit that need. I spoke to a customer this morning that we did some work with a while ago and replaced several security point products (a mobile VPN system, several internal firewalls, an SSL VPN and an old IP-sec based VPN) and he told me that one of effects he now has seen is lower usage of electricity due to less servers and point products. At the same time they started to virtulize the infrastructure so the effect was double (they run our server in a virtualized form "on top" of the applications)

I have not thought about this effect before but it makes me happy that increased security can sometimes lower energy consumption. So my tip of the day is to look into the usage of power when you design your next architecture.