Beyond Green IT: A Gate-First Cyber-Sustainability Decision Framework for Resilient and Inclusive Digital Services

Cybersecurity, operational resilience, environmental sustainability and access are usually assessed throughseparate instruments, even though all shape whether digital services deliver enduring public value. This paperdevelops a gate-first Cyber-Sustainability Decision Framework (CSDF) for resource-constrained Indian digitalinfrastructure. A bounded retrospective analysis reconstructs four documented Indian incident and serviceperformance cases: the 2022 AIIMS New Delhi cyberattack, the 2024 C-Edge/NPCI payment-networkisolation, Aadhaar-enabled public-distribution authentication difficulties in Andhra Pradesh (2017) and Delhi(2018), and the 2020 Dr. Reddy’s ransomware incident. Cases are selected for mechanism diversity, notrepresentativeness, and evidence is drawn from parliamentary records, official network statements, publishedacademic-institution research and company disclosures. The cases motivate non-compensatory requirementsfor recovery, supplier isolation, assisted access and transparent decision evidence; they do not supplycomparable organization-level energy or emissions observations. The framework then demonstratesfeasibility gating, Pareto screening and weight sensitivity using an independently labelled synthetic fivearchitecture matrix. Historical observations are not transferred into synthetic performance scores or treatedas treatment effects. The contribution is a traceable pathway from verified Indian failure mechanisms toprospective architecture-selection safeguards, coupled with a preregisterable measurement and validationprotocol. The study provides preliminary documentary grounding and proof of computational operation, notempirical proof of reductions in cyber losses or carbon emissions.