Social Responsibility and Sustainability

Our Commitment

At Universal, ensuring that we conduct business globally without negatively impacting the environment, community, or society as a whole is core to our business strategy. Our commitment to sustainability allows us to contribute to a healthier and thriving global supply chain.
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Universal’s goal is to provide our clients with the best custom and innovative technology solutions and services. Our goal to operate as a sustainable and socially responsible global organization is unified as one cohesive mission.

Our Responsibility and Sustainability Policies include:

• Establishing a governance overlay that develops and maintains on an ongoing basis a strategy that supports our sustainability mission
• Evaluating our day-to-day business processes and maintaining a list of actionable objectives that can have the greatest positive impact on our company, industry, customers, and environment
• Monitoring, quantifying, and measuring the progress of our sustainability objectives
• Directing the entire life cycle of our solutions delivery with an environmentally responsible approach.

Our guiding principles:

• Managing our business in a manner that minimizes any adverse impact on the environment and promotes the protection and improvement of the environment
• Promoting an employee culture of social responsibility in their day-to-day jobs
• Helping our clients to reach their own sustainability objectives
• Working with partners and suppliers that are equally committed to global sustainability efforts

Current Sustainability Initiatives

Office Footprint:

Universal has presence in several locations globally. To minimize our energy consumption we have scaled up our remote access and meeting capabilities, and established hybrid home/office work schedules for employees across all our locations.  In doing so we expect to reduce our impact to carbon emissions by:

• Reducing employee automotive travel to/from work, and supporting employee actions that reduce their own and our company’s carbon footprint
• Reducing energy consumption in office spaces (‘lights out/shades down’ in idle offices and rooms)
• Reducing energy consumption by transitioning to energy-efficient LED or CFL lighting where suitable
• Leveraging ‘desk hoteling’ space-sharing strategy for the workplace in which employees can rotate workspace, where suitable
• Retiring desk phones in favor of ‘soft phones’, where suitable

We also continually focus on upgrading general office equipment (printers, monitors, appliances) to the most energy-efficient models (e.g. Energy Star), and ensure that proper disposal of e-waste is carried out.

‍Datacenter footprint: 

Universal began our datacenter footprint reduction plan several years ago.  To minimize our energy consumption we continually optimize or re-engineer our WAN and Datacenter hubs.  We monitor equipment energy-consumption trends, and look for opportunities to update equipment (network, server,storage) to newer lower-power consumption devices.  We analyze equipment usage (e.g. port densities, capacities), and look for opportunities to reduce equipment form factor, and migrate more workloads to cloud. In doing so we expect to reduce our impact to carbon emissions by:

• Reducing rack space footprint
• Reducing rack power-draw

We also ensure that our datacenter colocation sites are themselves actively working on energy reduction, water utilization, and waste management initiatives.

Timeline:

As with all our sustainability efforts, we track initiatives on an annual basis, and our reference points shift as annual milestones are reached.  The following is our running timeline of primary initiatives: