Driving business value for Veritas and our customers by addressing environmental and social challenges

April is Earth Month.

At Veritas, it’s an opportunity to celebrate what we’ve achieved to reduce the company’s environmental impact and, as importantly, convey a sense of urgency across the business to double down on our efforts. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it recently: “Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

The way businesses address societal issues and ensure that they’re part of the solution is becoming increasingly important to customers and employees, and we’re feeling it at Veritas. We’re also seeing new regulations asking us to up our game on topics like climate change, modern slavery, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

In this context, Veritas has spearheaded a new Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) program, stemming from our Corporate Responsibility work, to further embed ESG across the business. The ESG team brings together leaders across Veritas to think outside the box and drive value for stakeholders including customers, employees, and communities, while addressing inequalities and climate change.

As VP and Veritas Chief Sustainability Officer Rags Srinivasan puts it, a company’s performance on ESG topics can determine if “it gets a chance to play,” meaning companies can be disqualified from working with customers and partners if they’re unable to show meaningful progress on ESG issues.

As part of its Earth Month celebration, the ESG team recently invited Veritas’ 6,000 employees to participate in a company townhall hosted by CEO Greg Hughes that featured guest speaker Andrew Winston, a globally-recognized author. The townhall, titled “Is the world better off because your business is in it?” challenged employees to look at their roles and responsibilities through an ESG lens. This townhall kicked off a companywide Climate action: Count me in! challenge, with tangible steps employees can take at work and beyond, from reducing food waste to avoiding a business flight.

The Veritas team is also working to design and engineer products that support our customers’ emissions reduction goals. The company works to increase the energy efficiency of its appliances and offers carbon-neutral shipping, reuse, and recycling programs coupled with our data management solutions, which enable elastic autoscaling and data deduplication for energy and carbon savings on-prem and in the cloud.

With efforts underway across the company, Veritas reduced its greenhouse gas emissions in FY22 by 34 percent from FY19 (page 10) for its entire value chain. This is only the start as the world aims to cut emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050.

Andrew Winston writes in his book, Net Positive when sharing case studies from companies such as Unilever: “Unilever is guided by doing the harder right thing versus choosing the easier wrong. Its ambitions push it beyond its comfort zone. We’re asking you to join us in this uncomfortable ambition.”

Let’s get uncomfortable.

For more information, explore the Veritas annual sustainability report.