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OracleBio’s green journey so far – Our road to sustainability
29 October 2021
By Mark Laurie

As a Glasgow-born company, we’re immensely proud to see COP26 being hosted in our home city.

With the Climate Change Conference in mind, it’s a good time for us to reflect on our own actions and how we’re helping tackle climate change as a company and as individuals.

As a Contract Research Organisation and digital IT company, the electronic transfer of files is a highly efficient way to share data, especially the size and scale of the images we work with every day; reducing transit costs. However, we’re aware of the impact of energy consumption by high-end computing power and we’re growing our IT infrastructure with this in mind.

Our on-premises servers are located within the DataVita, a cutting-edge data centre that is powered by 100% green energy that is a 7-minute walk from the OracleBio offices. DataVita has Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGO) and is a Climate Change Agreement Member, it’s also the country’s most energy-efficient, resilient, and secure facility, and the only Uptime Institute Tier III certified facility in Scotland. 

As we moved towards a more cloud-based infrastructure, this was more challenging with limited cloud platforms harnessing high levels of renewable energy at scale at the time, so we had to ensure we selected a partner who was climate-conscious and had a clear roadmap to being powered by 100% renewable while still having the technology to allow us and our clients to scale.

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Our partner of choice was Amazon Web Services (AWS), which not only provides the technology we needed but is focused on efficiency and continuous innovation across their global infrastructure with a roadmap to being powered with 100% renewable energy by 2025.

When it comes to our people, prior to the pandemic we operated a Work From Home policy for many years, where our team worked two days from home and three days at the office for more face-to-face collaborative working.

This had many advantages and was our commitment to creating a flexible working environment and a positive work-life balance for our team, but also resulted in a reduction in commuter costs, commuter stress, more valuable time spent productively and with our families, and of course, this resulted in a reduced environmental impact of our ever-growing team traveling to and from the office.

There is certainly more that we can do and learn going forward.

As COP26 kicks off this weekend, we’re using this time to reflect on our green strategy as a business and as citizens – we wholeheartedly encourage you to do the same. Small changes can make a big difference!

More information and some handy resources are linked below, including information on how to take green actions, calculate your own carbon footprint, the goals of COP26.

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