Sustainability Strategy
Our sustainability strategy guides us in our aim to become an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable company. At Medfields we target on development that meet the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generation to meet their requirements integrating values of economic vitality, healthy communities and sustainable natural environment.
Get sustainable, tomorrow wont wait
In many ways sustainability has simply become part of the way we do business. But when we look at the world around us, many of the issues we identified in our early sustainability reports remain challenges not only for our business but for the broader community. We have also seen new issues emerge. Business as usual, even a more sustainable business as usual, is not enough. Whilst we will continue with the actions we were quick to embed, such as sustainable sourcing practices and responsible lending and investment policies, we’re increasing our efforts on the emerging societal issues where we have unique skills and expertise to bring about meaningful change. Our people are passionate about it, because it makes sense for our business, because it’s part of who we are, because we know that tomorrow won’t wait.
Understanding the issue
Demographic change is a key social and economic challenge. Low fertility rates and increased life expectancy in population is ageing. The implications are skills shortages and a bigger picture of slower economic growth.
With a high proportion of the population already working, we will need to think more creatively about how we find and develop the employees of the future - that includes targeting groups that have traditionally been underemployed. But it doesn’t stop with us. We need to help our business customers who are facing the same issues and think about demographic and cultural change when building the products and services of the future.
Acting on the issue
Our initial focus is to improve participation - to attract the widest range of talented people and then use best practice flexible work practices and a wellbeing model to improve participation throughout working life. We’ll meet our own skill needs and share what we learn with customers, business peers and government.
Our Focus
Develop products and services that support an increase in financial well-being.
Ensuring our workforce is representative of the community with overall workforce participation quite high, we need to identify and encourage participation amongst groups that are underrepresented in the workplace. Initially we will focus on:
- Increasing the participation and earning potential of groups currently underrepresented in the workplace through career entry, development and flexible work practices
- Launching leading flexible work practices, understanding that flexibility and mobility are key enablers of participation.
- Promoting the productivity benefits for of a diverse and representative workforce.
Extend working lives and quality of life It’s our goal to provide our employees with the opportunity to extend the length and quality of their working lives, and to work with customers, the Government and other partners on the same challenge. This means helping our people understand the factors that influence their participation in work and their ability to adapt to a changing employment landscape throughout their working life. Ultimately we want to change the way our employees think about their wellbeing at work. To do this we will:
- Roll out a practical tool, well being at Medfields, to benchmark well being across the group
- Establish targets and develop programs to help employees improve their individual well-being scores
Anticipate future needs of ageing and culturally diverse customers The impact of these demographic changes will stretch well beyond our own workplace. One aspect we want to tackle is to encourage a national discussion on the factors that shape financial well-being
A strong strategy for a long term business growth
A team of 4 portfolio managers and research analysts manages our development strategy. The team is headed by Vice President, Mr. Sandeep Anand accompanied by Strategic Analyst Mr. Noyal T. Hari
Our team is aligned by industry and we leverage our expertise to provide in depth research.
The growth team is organized by industry, with each portfolio manager and research analyst focusing on an area of expertise. While each team member guides the decision making process on his sector, the team's questions and challenges shape the final decision on what goes into and out of the portfolio and the CEO, Mr Anees T makes the final implementation. As part of our strategic plan Medfields continue to develop networks of offices and relationships on other continents, particularly in US, UK and Australia. Medfields invest in other diversifications that are strategically positioned for consistent long-term growth and meet key investment criteria such as:
- Established brand name
- Free cash flow
- Favourable long term growth prospects
- Excellent management
- Recurring revenue stream
- Pricing power
Our Strategic Growth strategy seeks long term growth of capital. By investing in high quality businesses that we believe are strategically positioned for long term growth, we seek to:
- Deliver strong absolute returns to our clients over timee
- Consistently apply our long term philosophy, strategy and process
- Manage risk through disciplined portfolio construction and in depth knowledge of our companies
Green Cloud Computing & Environmental Sustainability
At Medfields we generally concentrate on energy efficiency, reducing resource consumption and disposing of electronic waste in a responsible manner.
Overview
Growing demand of Cloud infrastructure has drastically increased the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high operational cost, which reduces the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also leads to high carbon emissions which is not environmentally friendly. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required to minimize the impact of Cloud computing on the environment. In order to design such solutions, deep analysis of Cloud is required with respect to their power efficiency. Cloud phenomenon may aggravate the problem of carbon emissions and global warming. The reason given is that the collective demand for computing resources is expected to further increase dramatically in the next few years. Even the most efficiently built datacenter with the highest utilization rates will only mitigate, rather than eliminate, harmful CO2 emissions. The reason given is that Cloud providers are more interested in electricity cost reduction rather than carbon emission. Through the use of large shared virtualized datacenters Cloud computing can offer large energy savings. However, Cloud services can also further increase the Internet traffic and its growing information database, which could decrease such energy savings.
Even though there is a great concern in the community that Cloud computing can result in higher energy usage by the datacenters, the Cloud computing has a green lining. There are several technologies and concepts employed by Cloud providers to achieve better utilization and efficiency than traditional computing. Therefore, comparatively lower carbon emission is expected in Cloud computing due to highly energy efficient infrastructure and reduction in the IT infrastructure itself by multi-tenancy. The key driver technology for energy efficient Clouds is Virtualization, which allows significant improvement in energy efficiency of Cloud providers by leveraging the economies of scale associated with large number of organizations sharing the same infrastructure. By consolidation of underutilized servers in the form of multiple virtual machines sharing same physical server at higher utilization, companies can gain high savings in the form of space, management, and energy.
Medfields follow three key factors that have enabled the Cloud computing to lower energy usage and carbon emissions from ICT. Due to these Cloud features, organizations can reduce carbon emissions by at least 30% per user by moving their applications to the Cloud. These savings are driven by the high efficiency of large scale Cloud data centers.
Dynamic provisioning
In traditional setting, datacenters and private infrastructure used to be maintained to fulfill worst-case demand. Thus companies end up deploying far more infrastructure than needed. There are various reasons for such over-provisioning, to guarantee availability of services and to maintain certain level of service quality to end-users. Such scenarios can be readily managed by cloud infrastructure. The virtual machines in a Cloud infrastructure can be live migrated to another host in case user application requires more resources. Cloud providers monitor and predict the demand and thus allocate resources according to demand. Those applications that require less number of resources can be consolidated on the same server. Thus, datacenters always maintain the active servers according to current demand, which results in low energy consumption than the conservative approach of over-provisioning.
Multi-tenancy
Using multi-tenancy approach, Cloud computing infrastructure reduces overall energy usage and associated carbon emissions. The SaaS providers serve multiple companies on same infrastructure and software. This approach is obviously more energy efficient than multiple copies of software installed on different infrastructure. Furthermore, businesses have highly variable demand patterns in general, and hence multi-tenancy on the same server allows the flattening of the overall peak demand which can minimize the need for extra infrastructure. The smaller fluctuation in demand results in better prediction and results in greater energy savings.
Server utilization
In general, on-premise infrastructure runs with very low utilization, sometimes it goes down up to 5-10% of average utilization. Using virtualization technologies, multiple applications can be hosted and executed on the same server in isolation, taking the utilization levels up to 70%. This results in more power consumption but server running at higher utilization can process more workload with similar power usage.