Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the most existential challenges our world faces today and is an increasing priority for our customers. WhiteSpider is committed to supporting their customers on this journey. Be prepared - sustainability reporting for businesses is just around the corner.

The evolution of sustainability priorities is quite remarkable. Gone are the days when the focus was solely on risk management and compliance. Today, sustainability is being seen as a catalyst for driving business outcomes, innovation, and creating a competitive edge. To support this shift, companies are increasingly turning to technology, leveraging IT to advance their sustainability agenda. WhiteSpider can help.

Every organisation is looking to reduce its environmental impact and enhance sustainability – not just because the law demands this by 2050! IT contributes 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, our solutions ensure that: 

• you will make better use of the cloud that aligns with your business
• your energy consumption and environmental management will transform your organisation
• you modernise your infrastructure to drive a zero carbon strategy
• you optimise workloads for cost savings and efficiency.
• You support today’s priorities of hybrid working.

Get in touch with us for your free consultation on sustainable IT solutions.

WhiteSpider's Social and Environmental Responsibility Statement

The demand to accelerate a sustainable, digital transformation has never been greater. As a provider of technology solutions, WhiteSpider is well situated to help organisations improve their performance and reduce their impact on the environment, however it is important that our business is at the forefront of the drive. As such we have three core areas of focus:

• Driving our business to become a more ethical, sustainable and responsible business
• Developing solutions that help our customers improve their carbon footprint
• Working with stakeholders to deliver more sustainable IT services and solutions

Building a Better Business

WhiteSpider was founded on the principles of being a morally and ethically sound business. We aim to be an organisation that has a positive impact in all we do. This has not changed; however, we are continually adapting what this looks like to our employees and stakeholders. At present we see that this comprises four main areas:

1. Improving the lives of our direct employees through good working practices to support their physical and mental well-being during the time they are employed and enhancing their future prospects. This year we launched our ‘Mountains for the Mind’ initiative, in which all our employees are invited to meet once a month to take part in a walk around the UK countryside; as fresh air/the outdoors have been shown to improve mental health.
2. Delivering positive environmental impact. We aim to reduce the environmental impact of our business through becoming a Net Zero organisation. We anticipate this being by 2030, and whilst we continue to implement changes to improve our emissions, we are developing measurements to accurately track our progress. 
3. Supporting our customers and stakeholders. Whilst it is necessary that we operate a financially sound business, we also believe we have a duty to act morally and ethically with customers and suppliers. For example, working in healthcare we will always put patient’s lives as first importance of any decisions we make.
4. Cultivating strategic partnerships. We choose to work with companies that share the same values and principles as us. For example, one company we work with helps businesses sustainably and securely support the IT circular economy. 

Developing Better Solutions

We have developed, and continue to develop, software solutions that enable our customers to improve their use of IT and improve energy efficiency. Solutions we have developed include:

• Energy Management: This solution accurately measures the Hardware Energy Consumption, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and Carbon Intensity of a customer’s IT infrastructure and enables decisions and actions to be taken to improve overall energy efficiency.
• Power Management: This solution enables customers to remotely power off individual power sockets on a smart PDU enabling power savings.

Improving the IT Supply Chain

More and more, IT vendors are creating technology solutions and services that reduce waste and energy consumption. We are supporting our customers in a wide range of ways:

• Make appropriate use of cloud services that aligns with their business
• Modernise and improve the efficiency of infrastructure
• Optimise workloads for cost savings and efficiency
• Improve circularity of products through recycling and use of refresh kit 

What we're currently doing:

Energy Savings

We have recently worked to consolidate our data centre infrastructure to reduce the power consumption of our racks. This work included removing old inefficient and under-used infrastructure, as well as making architectural changes to allow our services to run with fewer devices. 

This initiative resulted in the yearly kilowatt usage dropping from 5475kW recorded in 2022 to 2990kW recorded in 2023 and has resulted in significant savings in power costs.  

Working Location

Our employees have a large degree of flexibility around where they work. Almost all required applications and services can be accessed in the same way whether working remotely or in the office. To reduce the impact of our employees travelling to the office, our office is based in Leeds city centre; enabling close proximity to major roads and a 10-minute walk from Leeds train station. Typically staff from further away from offices are required to attend the office less frequently, usually once a month for team days. Although, to maintain regular personal contact, we maintain flexible office space to allow regular meetings and collaborative working for those staff. 

Reduce Travel Impact

A key part of our business operations is to work directly on customer sites, whether this be sales meetings, service meetings or implementing project work. While critical, we ensure travel to meetings is kept to a minimum, and public transport is used where possible. We strongly encourage the use of public transport and EV/plug-in hybrid car sharing for staff to travel to offices, nonvirtual meetings and site visits over the use of private petrol/diesel fuelled vehicles. The use of trains, electric/plug in hybrid cars and buses can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to two-thirds per passenger, per kilometer compared to petrol/diesel cars.

Our Sustainability Goals

Goal 1: Environmental Certifications 

• Goal: Obtain and maintain ISO 14001 environmental certifications for all facilities by mid-2025. 

• Actions: Implement environmental management systems, conduct regular audits, and continually improve processes to meet certification requirements.  

Goal 2: Employee Engagement in Sustainability 

• Goal: Involve all employees in sustainability initiatives in 2025. 

• Actions: Nominate two ‘WhiteSpider Sustainability Champions’ that promote and advocate our sustainable practices to the wider team. 

Goal 3: Community Engagement 

• Goal: Support local environmental initiatives by conducting an engaged plan and company-wide volunteering day a year in 2026. 

• Actions: Have our ‘WhiteSpider Sustainability Champions’ partner with local environmental organisations and engage/plan a company-wide volunteering day. 

Goal 4: Carbon Neutrality 

• Goal: Achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. 

• Actions: Implement energy-efficient technologies, switch to renewable energy sources, and offset unavoidable emissions through certified carbon offset programs.