Cloud computing meets supply chain transparency and risk

Grazed from EnterpriseIrregulars. Author: Tom Raferty.

Supply chains? Yawn, right? While supply chains may seem boring, they are of vital importance to organisations, and their proper management can make, or break companies. Some recent examples of where poorly managed supply chains caused at best, serious reputational damage for companies include the Apple Computers child labour and workers suicide debacle; the Tesco horse meat scandal; and Nestlé’s palm oil problems.

What does this have to do with Cloud computing? Well, last week, here in GreenMonk we published a ranking of cloud computing companies and their use of renewables. Greenqloud, Windows Azure, Google, SAP and Rackspace all come out of it quite well. On the other hand, IBM and Oracle didn’t fare well in the study due to their poor commitment to renewables…

But, at least they are reasonably transparent about it. Both organisations produce quite detailed corporate responsibility reports, and both report their emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project. So if you are sourcing your cloud infrastructure from Oracle or IBM, you can at least find out quite easily where the dirty energy powering your cloud is coming from…

Read more from the source @ http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/74161/cloud-computing-meets-supply-chain-transparency-risk/