Promoting Security and Sustainability: A Strategic Approach
The fact that the need for cyber security is increasing due to the amount of hacker attacks has probably not gone unnoticed by anyone. You might also have heard about Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive on EU level that will force European companies to do sustainability reporting from next years annual reports.
Still, the feeling I get when discussing with peers in the industry is that these topics are very low in priority for most people when it comes to short term prioritization. Increasing your security or climate impact almost always come after YAF (Yet Another Feature) when it comes to priority.
When I compare these two areas I can draw a conclusion: both are areas that have not been part of the KPIs for the people that controls budgets. When important measures like site traffic, conversion rate and sales (when applicable) is the only measures that are being looked at, of course these (very important) measures will get focus.
However, when it comes to IT-security – there’s of course a potentially very high cost if something does happen (which it will sooner or later) that needs to be taken into consideration. Not paying attention to this is like running a company without a proper insurance – of course the short-term benefits of not having to pay the insurance fee will increase results in the short term, until something happens where the insurance is needed. The new CSRD reporting will force companies to get measurements in place that will get more visibility – both internally, but also to investors and customers which should increase the prioritization of these areas.
What are we at Epinova doing to address these important areas?
At Epinova, we spent a considerable amount of time last year to get even more control and measurement systems in place, educate staff and to build more security focused functionality into our development framework that we use to build web sites and e-commerce solutions. If you want to get a high level overview of what to consider when it comes to having a secure and resilient web site in 2024 – I recommend my blog post on the topic:
https://www.epinova.se/blogg/2024/how-to-build-a-secure-and-resilient-website-in-2024/
When it comes to sustainability, Epinova has always had a high focus on having lean and fast web sites, which usually also means that they are less energy intensive. A very concrete example is to always have compressed images and to apply lazy loading (only download an image when it's actually needed) which decreases the size of network transfer. Currently, we are investigating where solutions are being hosted and moving solutions to regions with a lower carbon intensive electricity production. If you want to know more about IT and Corporate Sustainability Reporting – we will have a seminar in our offices in Stockholm the 17th of May (In Swedish):
https://www.epinova.se/nyheter/2024/seminarie-har-du-koll-pa-ert-digitala-klimatavtryck/
Introducing the Epinova Dashboard and a data-driven approach
To highlight these areas, as well as other important areas like accessibility, we’ve developed a dashboard system that collects data from all the different systems we use to measure the different areas. Together with the more business focused areas like SEO visibility, site traffic, conversion rates and high-level goals like revenue we can make data easily accessible for our customers, and have high level discussions where we include all these areas as input to be able to focus on the right areas.
If you are interested to hear more about this concept - please get in touch and I'll be happy to go through this more in detail.
We would like to hear what you think about the blog post