In light of the increasing chance of disruption to the UK due to the Coronavirus outbreak, we wanted to share the key points from our Smartdesc Business Continuity Plan and reassure our customers of our ability to continue to function and provide core services in the face of a pandemic.
Smartdesc is a digital first organisation. All of our systems are 100% cloud based, and our data resides within UK and EU datacentres.
Our UK team are fully agile; they work from multiple locations week in, week out. Staff have flexible, remote working built into their contracts and have the equipment necessary to do their job from anywhere. This includes Smartdesc offices, client offices and home locations. As such, any barriers to using public transport would not affect their ability to work. If a customer site visit was required for some reason, our staff would travel to site by private transport; they are all based around London and the South East.
Our Service Desk Team are also equipped with laptops that allow them to all work from home in the event of the main office becoming unavailable. Our phone and ticketing system is cloud based and completely flexible. Service Desk agents have soft-phone applications on their computers and mobile devices, meaning they can continue to take calls as they do now. Our call routing is completely configurable to allow us to ensure calls are still answered and Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) are met in the same way as now.
Finally, our Service Desk ticketing system, and our monitoring and backup systems – used both internally and on our customers’ networks – are fully cloud based, therefore, we are not reliant on physical travel to access servers to maintain these services.
One area that is outside of our control, is supply chain. We have seen some instances of hardware orders being delayed due to manufacturing delays in Asia. As the virus is generally receding in China, manufacturers are starting up again, but new hardware may be subject to additional 2-3 week delays. We work with a number of distributors who can source stock from Europe and the Americas, so we will always explore alternative avenues if a hardware order is urgent, but lead times may be longer over the next few months.
If you have any questions about any of the above, please get in touch.
