Introduction

The company is committed to protecting the environment and endeavours to reduce its environmental footprint arising from our services, activities and products. Environmental work is an integral part of the company’s activities and our CEO is responsible for ensuring that the company’s environmental policy is applied and that any existing actions are planned are implemented.
To support this, we have implemented an Environmental Management System aligned to the requirements of ISO 14001:2015.

Responsibilities

It is the responsibility of all line managers to;

  • Be familiar with this policy
  • Ensure this policy is upheld and applied consistently

It is the responsibility of employees to;

  • Be familiar with this policy
  • Ensure this policy is used as appropriate

It is the responsibility of HR to;

  • Maintain this policy and communicate any changes
  • Provide guidance
  • Ensure that this policy and procedure is implemented effectively, in a consistent and fair manner

Our impacts

The company is committed to reducing the negative environmental impacts of our own services, activities and products, in particular those relating to:

  • Our data centre: computing equipment, energy usage, water usage, and waste
  • Our offices: water usage, energy usage, and waste
  • Our products and services: carbon footprint, customer equipment and the goods and services we choose for our offices: cleaning, furniture, stationery, and IT equipment
  • Our suppliers: travel, equipment, and waste
  • Our business: travel and those of our commuting colleagues

Our commitments

The company is actively committed to being and remaining a sustainable business and always strives for energy efficient computing. Through our Environmental Policy, we are committed to:

  • Ensuring environmental issues are considered in planning our business and managing our operations
  • Complying with requirements of environmental legislation and client standards where applicable, to meet our environmental obligations
  • Continually improving our environmental performance through the development and achievement of objectives and targets.
  • Providing the necessary training and guidance to employees and other workers to ensure they are fully aware of the company’s environmental policy and our environmental objectives and targets and are able to fulfil these commitments.
  • Preventing pollution of the environment and having procedures in place to deal with environmental accident.
  • Reducing our energy use and carbon emission through our carbon reduction plan.
  • Achieving NetZero by 2035

The key areas of focus for reducing our impacts are:

Data Centre

  • Utilising virtualisation for a multitude of technologies, which include Virtual Servers for our hosting business and customer solutions on our Public Cloud
  • Reducing power wastage from under-utilised systems and cooling costs compared with their physical equivalents. This is achieved through virtualisation. This is mainly due to the ability to consolidate workloads which require far fewer servers
  • Using a centrally controlled, integrated building management system that controls and reports the building’s HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) system status; this allows our data centre to be temperature controlled which lowers energy wastage
  • Using the latest design principles to minimise power consumption, generate customer savings and improve our carbon footprint. This includes cold aisle containment which reduces the volume of cold air required and contributes to an accepted Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) target.

Products and Services

  • Choosing suppliers who are recognised as being driven to lower their environmental impact through recycling, waste management or travel management
  • Recycling electrical equipment by use of a WEEE skip, which meets current legislation; re-selling mobile equipment to companies for re-use and donating computers and IT equipment to charity

Business Travel

  • Reducing the company’s carbon footprint from travel by promoting a bike to work scheme, making use of technology, such as video conferencing and use of public transportation.

Offices

  • Training colleagues on the use of resources, with the aim to promote the recycling of paper, products, and equipment
  • Reducing electricity consumption through the installation of auto power-off lights within our offices; turning off computers at the end of the day and replacing existing light bulbs with energy efficient ones
  • Regulating heating and cooling by thermostats, to curtail energy wastage
  • Operating a centrally controlled, comfort cooling system which automatically turns the air-conditioning requirement off at given times during the day and weekend, thereby curtailing energy wastage
  • Lowering paper consumption by sending a minimal amount of our invoices in paper format; instead we deliver invoices via e-mail or to portals. This is an area in which we are constantly working with our customers
  • Recycling office and customer paper waste by shredding; this reduces environmental impact – every ton of paper recycled can save 4,000 kw of energy, 26,498 litres of water and 17 trees. Every document securely destroyed is recycled, improving our organisation’s environmental footprint as well as preventing data theft
  • Lowering paper consumption by promoting correspondence via e-mail instead of by traditional post and requesting the recipient to consider the environment before printing the message
  • Use of Hydro Taps within our office kitchens for energy efficiency and a reduction in water wastage.