Cybersecurity vendor Zscaler specializes in zero-trust security, but it's also targeting net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025, the company announced in tandem with its claim of carbon neutrality for 2022.

Even as a cybersecurity company, which doesn't seem like it would have much of an environmental impact, Zscaler said its enterprise customers are asking for increasingly more information on its environmental program and impacts — especially as the company grows and takes its carbon footprint up with it.

"It’s important for growth companies like Zscaler to understand and address their impacts now and build strong practices that will set the stage for deeper reductions," a company spokesperson told SDxCentral.

The vast majority of Zscaler's GHG emissions stem from energy used to power its Zero Trust Exchange cloud platform, which operates in six continents and processes more than 250 billion transactions each day. According to the edge service provider's most recent carbon inventory, most of its scope 2 emissions are from fossil fuel-based energy use at its data centers, the spokesperson explained.

To that point, the company recently announced it is powering its offices and distributed data centers with 100% renewable energy as a result of action taken by its data center providers combined with renewable energy credits (RECs) purchased by Zscaler.

Seventy-five percent of the energy used in its data centers is renewably sourced by those providers directly or through providers' virtual power purchase agreements, and the remaining 25% of fossil fuel-based energy is matched with RECs. "We are choosing this approach because as a secure service edge provider, our footprint is not concentrated in any one location, but spread out across many global locations," they explained.

In a step toward its net-zero goal, Zscaler similarly backs up its status of carbon neutrality in 2022 with the purchase of RECs to match projected electricity consumption and the purchase of carbon offsets to match projected carbon emissions for this year.

To directly address scope 2 emissions, Zscaler updated its data center selection process to incorporate criteria around renewable energy use. After that, the remainder of the fossil fuel-based energy powering Zscaler's data centers was matched with RECs that support local wind and solar projects.

The vendor says it offset broader scope 1 and scope 3 emissions from its offices, business travel, procurement, and customer and public cloud usage through carbon credits from verified third-party projects.

Zscaler executives' compensation is not currently tied to performance on environmental targets or to the company's overall environmental impact.

While Zscaler noted it worked with an external third-party to verify its carbon inventory methodology and quantification of emissions, the vendor's emissions reduction efforts currently aren't as impactful as they could be.

The idea behind RECs is that the purchasing company's efforts to fund renewable energy generation erase — at least on paper — the environmental impact of the company's continued use of fossil fuels and the associated GHG emissions. This constitutes a claim of carbon neutrality, even though the company is still responsible for carbon being released into the atmosphere.

This is something Zscaler seems to recognize, however, noting that "carbon neutral is not the end goal, and that deeper reductions and optimizations are vital to reaching net zero."

The vendor's strategy to reach net-zero hinges on the use of data to evaluate its operations and track drivers for emissions, along with deeper supplier engagement to target scope 3 supply chain emissions, according to the spokesperson.

"As we identified customer usage of our cloud as the largest source of emissions, continuing to seek and work with our data center providers on increasing efficiency and renewable energy usage is a priority. We will address the remaining balance of our greenhouse gas footprint from scopes 1 and 3 by continuing to refine our procurement processes and policies as we forge the way to net zero by 2025," they said.

Zscaler noted that its use of RECs and carbon offsets is "an urgent and important step that we can take today as we work on further reductions in our push towards net zero by 2025," and the company plans to "prioritize driving efficiencies in our operations to reduce emissions in order to lower our reliance on carbon offsets," the spokesperson explained, citing examples like supplier selection processes and business policies that consider environmental impact. "We believe this is the best way forward to reduce our company’s climate impact as our business grows," they said.