How will an organization get certified?

Our sustainability certificate will be implemented by TCO Development, a world-renowned, independent sustainability certification developer for IT products.

This means fast availability of the sustainability certification and an existing, reliable verification process based on the 'TCO Certified' product certification. This certification system includes the following steps that will be adapted for the Cloud resource certification where possible.

• To qualify for a certificate, the suppliers are required to comply with all of the criteria. This will be verified beforehand by independent experts.
• After a digital resource producer applies and receives the Type I certification, TCO Certified will request follow-up verification at relevant intervals following its approval. This ensures that those who have received the certification continuously uphold the high standards that come with the certificate.
• Additionally, if suppliers do not meet the requirements they will have to develop a corrective action plan and get their corrections confirmed by an independent expert.

What is the scope of the verification - an availability zone or data center facility?

As part of the initial development process will be investigated whether the sustainable certification proposed by SDIA and TCO Development can be applied to a single digital resource product or an entire region/availability zone that produces digital resources.

In the scenario of an availability zone, a digital resource product is uniquely identified with its instance name and the name of the location of production (region & availability zone). Therefore, if an entire availability zone were to be certified, then all the digital resources generated by it would implicitly become sustainable digital resources.

You can contribute to the development of the certification here.