Heat recovery is the practice of capturing waste heat from computing systems, such as servers or cooling equipment, and reusing it for another purpose, like space heating, hot water, or an industrial process. In a data center, this can turn what would normally be rejected into a useful energy stream.
For cyber security, heat recovery matters because it sits inside the same physical and digital control environment as the rest of the infrastructure. Building-management systems, temperature sensors, pumps, and valves must be monitored and protected, since tampering or failure can disrupt cooling, raise operating costs, or even force a shutdown. In practice, heat recovery appears in secure facility design and in defense planning: operators track thermal loads, isolate control networks, and log changes to ensure the system keeps running safely while reducing waste.