Cloud Gateway’s commitment to ESG: An update

At a time where Environmental, Social, and Governmental (ESG) concerns are becoming more urgent than ever, it is critical that businesses respond decisively and without delay to these issues. While the benefits of a strong ESG proposition are now more widely accepted, it is incumbent on organisations like ours to embrace the challenges in front of us and continue to drive meaningful and lasting change that will benefit the communities we live and operate within.

At Cloud Gateway, we’re committed to a proactive and responsible approach to ESG that we believe will engage, inspire and challenge our community of customers, partners and staff on the value of a comprehensive and well considered ESG strategy. We’ve been busy expanding the scope of our Environmental, Social and Governance initiatives over the last few months, and so wanted to take this opportunity to provide an update on the progress we’ve made so far, and our plans for 2024.

Environmental

Our recently updated Carbon Reduction Plan demonstrates our commitment to understanding and lowering our carbon footprint. This year, there has been an increase in our scope 3 emissions, from 30 tonnes of CO2 last year to 50 tonnes of CO2 this year. This is  because of an adjustment in the way we were recording and reporting the data (to get more detailed calculations), as well as significant growth in personnel over recent months. Despite this, we’re pleased to report that we have offset all 80 tonnes of CO2 as part of Carbon Neutral Britain’s ‘Climate Leader’ initiative. The offsetting contributions are used for projects that are either VCS (Verified Carbon Standard) VER (Voluntary Emissions Reduction) or CER (Certified Emission Reduction) certified. They are also often based in the developing world and focused on education, employment, clean water, energy and positive impacts to local wildlife.

Recent UN IPCC studies clearly state that the next five years are the most critical to our efforts to slow and reverse the impact of climate change. It is imperative that businesses continue to reduce and offset their carbon emissions. With this in mind, we have committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030,  and will strive to accelerate this timeline over the coming months and years.

You can find a full copy of our Carbon Reduction Plan, here, which provides detail on the environmental initiatives we have completed this year, and those that we have planned for 2024. These include a change to marketing and asset management policies, the introduction of an environmental newsletter to employees, and a review of environmental impacts across our supply chain.

Social

We are excited to announce that we have recently signed up to the Social Value Portal. Their mission is to engage, enable and empower people and organisations to work together in the pursuit of social, economic and environmental wellbeing. This aligns perfectly with our own values and commitments around ESG, and will bring rigour and transparency to the means by which we measure, manage, and report social value. Importantly, it will enable us to accurately track and report on the positive impact these initiatives are having within our local communities.

The Social Value Portal has pledged to deliver £100 billion of social value by 2025. Their methodology allows companies like ours to measure how we are performing against the National TOMs, an accredited framework aligned to the government and UN's key objectives around ESG. This partnership will arm us with the data and insights we need to make more informed decisions around the direction our ESG strategy takes in 2024 and beyond. It allows us to document and showcase the specific activities we’re engaged in, and attribute a value to them that prospective customers across the public sector can evaluate against a standardised scoring matrix.

We are very proud to have already contributed £232,290 worth of social value towards this target. This figure covers a two month period since we partnered with the Social Value Portal.

Governance

We recently passed our ISO9001 external assessment and have been re-certified for a further three years. We hold CE, CE+, ISO27001, PSN and CNSP certifications, while also received excellent feedback and results from our annual IT Health Check. Our due diligence model is aligned to the requirements set out in the G-Cloud framework, as well as complying with Joscar and Technology Services 3. 

We have a solid internal structure and reporting process in relation to company governance and compliance with law and ethical business practices. This includes robust policies covering Risk Management, Modern Slavery, Whistleblowing, Environmental Action, Employee Wellbeing, Social Value and Business Continuity.

We’re just getting started

We’ll be providing regular updates on our progress across all these initiatives over the coming months. Check back into the Knowledge Centre to hear how we’re getting on, or follow us on LinkedIn here.