Sustainability
KMD defines define compliance and sustainability as working systematically to reduce negative and enhance positive impacts on people, society, and the environment and is committed to contributing where a change can be made.
The KMD Supplier Code of Conduct sets the frame for what KMD expects our suppliers to comply with and corresponds with the declared policies of sustainability from the Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud solutions.
KMD sustainability guidelines for suppliers
In order to be approved as KMD suppliers, suppliers must:
- Comply with all relevant legislation.
- Seek to prevent, minimize and attend to any adverse environmental impact of the supplier’s own activities, products and services.
- Deliver and use products with ecolabel and energy saving products to the extent such products are available in the market unless specifically requested otherwise.
- Suppliers of electronic hardware must comply with the RoHS directive (2011/65/EU)and (EU) 2015/861).
- If the supplier supplies products or components of products which contain metals or minerals covered by the OECD “Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals form Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas”, the supplier must ensure compliance with these guidelines
Microsoft Azure sustainability policies
Microsoft's environmental sustainability strategy consists of three themes:
- Reducing the impact: Microsoft has a goal of becoming carbon neutral in own operations by employing an internal carbon fee for all data center operation, software development labs, office buildings and employee travel.
- Enable resource efficiency: Microsoft invests in developing software and tools that can reduce energy consumption of supported software and devices and also researches in increased efficiency, monitoring and energy management of buildings, transportation and supply chains. Microsoft also collaborates with major industry partners to increase efficiency even further.
- Accelerating research breakthroughs: Microsoft is increasing research in order to increase knowledge of energy usage, resource management and environmental planning.
Microsoft has calculated that cloud solutions are more sustainable compared to on-premises solutions as cloud-hosted solutions can reduce per-user carbon footprint by at least 30% and in some cases up to 90% for small businesses.
These reductions are facilitated by:
- Dynamic provisioning: Scaling cloud resources up and down according to customer needs
- Multi-tenancy: Having multiple customers co-tenant the same cloud office space
- Server utilization: Using virtualization technology to spread workloads increases server utilization from 11-15% to 50% or higher.
- Data center design: improved center design uses 50% less energy, is very water efficient and uses recyclable construction materials.
- Waste-to-energy and renewable power projects: Running data centers on energy generated by waste management or from renewable sources can help to replace energy generated from traditional sources (coal, oil and natural gas).
- Increased energy efficiency: Researching and implementing innovations to increase energy efficiency in all levels of the cloud structure, spanning from server hardware to the energy architecture and all the way to the constriction and day-to-day operation of the data centers.
Oracle Cloud sustainability policies
Oracle endeavors to achieve a greater degree of sustainability in their cloud environments and solutions with the following policies and approaches:
- High Utilization: By operating compacted clusters of environments, Oracle can achieve higher utilization rates than many customers can by operating the same environments or systems on-premises.
- Energy Efficiency: By utilizing modern, state-of-the-art intelligent energy management and cooling technology, Oracle can obtain an high level of energy efficiency of their cloud environments.
- Elasticity: By being able to dynamically and rapidly scale capacity up or down according to immediate or long-term customer requirements, Oracle can reduce the potential impact of over- or under capacity as well as reduce the need for customers to acquire extra capacity for themselves.
- Renewable Energy: By focusing on increasing use of energy generated from renewable resources, both from new vendors and from existing vendors, Oracle is reducing its dependency on traditional energy sources.
- Circularity: By removing the customer's needs for physical resources, Oracle customers can concentrate on their primary requirements - the ability to process data as well as the final results of the data processing instead of maintaining and replacing their physical hardware.
- Design for the environment: By assessing energy efficiency, dematerialization, serviceability and recyclability , Oracle prioritizes the environment when designing and developing products.
- Consolidate. Simplify. Optimize: By consolidating data centers, and avoiding on-premises systems, logistics, transport and maintenance costs of hardware and systems are reduced while reuse and recycling opportunities are increased.
- Maximize resource utilization: By consolidating the deployed hardware, Oracle can monitor the deployed hardware better, leading to improved hardware and spare parts reuse as well as improve resource reallocation options at the product's end-of-life.
Reference links
KMD - Sustainability and Compliance
KMD - Supplier code of conduct (PDF)
Microsoft - Coporate Social Responsibility
Microsoft - Sustainability policy
Microsoft - Azure sustainability
Oracle Sustainability Solutions - Cloud Operations