Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors and developing an ESG enterprise mindset has become a C-suite top priority. Adopting and using ESG factors and an ESG enterprise mindset requires a shift for business leaders. These business leaders increasingly recognize the importance of the social and environmental purpose of an organization’s brand, customers, stakeholders, and its own workforce.
The term sustainability is generally used to signify programs, initiatives and actions designed to help the preservation of a particular resource. However, it refers specifically to four distinctive areas: human, social, economic, and environmental. These four areas are known as the four pillars of sustainability.
It’s important for business leaders to understand that shareholder profitability is not the sole measure of corporate success any longer. Increasingly, investors and other stakeholders are expanding their assessment and understanding of a company’s value to include ESG factors and an ESG enterprise mindset. ESG performance and factors are being taken into consideration in business analysis and when examining long-term risks of organizations. For business leaders, adapting to this new ESG enterprise mindset is a complex but necessary change. This shift will require business leaders to honestly collect and analyze significant amounts of data to measure ESG performance and to identify ways to grow and improve while incorporating ESG factors in everything that they do.
Infrastructure Assessment
An infrastructure assessment helps businesses to decide whether they are getting the most possible from their technology. It’s a strategic approach to technology and is many times vital to controlling costs while also maintaining performance standards. It’s worth noting that all technology comes with an expiration date and staying up to date with the effectiveness of the technology organizations use is an important part of successful business planning and strategy.
Today, infrastructure is everywhere. Rather than staying static, it has seen significant disruption spurred by the rapid growth of the cloud and the shift to hybrid IT. It is important for business leaders to understand how to harness the power of infrastructure services now and into the future.
Defining Infrastructure Services
We’ve previously addressed the importance of workplace and infrastructure in the digital age, as well as the future of workplace and infrastructure solutions. According to Investopedia, infrastructure includes networking equipment and servers due to the important function they provide within specific business environments. If businesses do not have IT infrastructure, businesses struggle to share and move data in an efficient way within the workplace. And when IT infrastructure fails, many business functions are not able to be performed.
Infrastructure services include communication services, networking, data processing and storage, platforms through which businesses can share content and media, knowledge management, systems, applications, IoT, user devices, resilience. Most importantly, infrastructure services provide a help desk to support end users with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees a level of service.
Gartner predicts that the change of pace for infrastructure and operations (I&O) will only increase as time goes on and as IT leaders face pressure to more quickly create, deploy, manage and govern dynamic application environments.
Your Data is Everywhere Thanks to Infrastructure
A hybrid world means that infrastructure is located wherever the business needs it, which means data is easily accessible. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 50 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the cloud or data center. Data impacts will certainly accompany this growth and I&O teams may struggle to provide the protection and management needed. Gartner recommends that in its early stages, mandate a data-driven infrastructure impact assessment. Pinpoint where data is being stored, how it will be consumed, and how important factors like its growth rate could impact I&O’s ability to manage and protect it.
