COVID-19 Business Continuity Planning

As we are all hearing in the news, COVID-19, or the Novel Coronavirus, is becoming a major issue throughout the world. Although we remain hopeful that the virus will be contained, we are concerned about the potential impacts an outbreak could have on businesses. We encourage you to be thinking about your own business continuity plan and how you can enable continuous operations if you plan to establish remote work for your team or in the event that there is a quarantine in your area.

Some questions to consider: 

• • Can your employees work remotely? Do you have:
    • Laptops or computers employees can utilize remotely?
    • Sufficient bandwidth for remote users? 
    • Sufficient VPN licenses for remote connectivity? 
  • Do you have a policy for remote access that allows or does not allow use of personal PCs for remote work, in the event that company-issued machines are not available? 
  • What applications and services are business critical, nice to have, and what can you do without? (phones, mail, QuickBooks, etc.)
  • Are all your business-critical applications available to remote users?  
    • Determine how long the organization can continue without each in these categories. If additional tools are needed, what would the additional cost be, and does it require someone to come onsite to install it? 
  • Have users who can work remotely tested their remote access? This is important to do before a critical event occurs.

We want to assure you that our team here at Vertikal6 is fully enabled to work remotely. Our goal has always been to provide our clients with support and services, regardless of the availability of our physical office space, and our planning has included: 

• • Provisioning all employees with laptops and softphones to enable work from anywhere
  • Utilizing application technologies that are globally available
  • Preparing plans for ticket overflow with cross-team training and availability

If you would like to discuss your preparedness for a work-from-home event, such as COVID-19 or other types of disasters, please reach out to us, and we can schedule some time to discuss the impacts on your business. We also encourage you to consider developing (or revisiting, if you already have one) a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan which will outline your steps to respond to disasters before they occur.