press release: BUSINESS CONTINUITY FOR COVID-19

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Preparedness for Coronavirus

CCS Business Solutions has many technological measures put in place to handle a need for continual service from outside the office.  While historically these measures have been designed to protect us in the snowy Midwest, the same approach can be taken while in a situation where our staff must work from the safety of  their home during a potential pandemic.

The core of our ability  to handle this is the private cloud based computing and telephony we sell to our customers.  Our office contains none of the systems or phone lines we leverage on a day-to-day basis.  All of our processing and voice is serviced in the confines of our protected data center, and like our private cloud customers, is securely accessible from anywhere in the world.  The transition to a fully remote staff at CCS Business Solutions is a seamless event, and there are no changes in avenues of communication or service level agreements with our customers.  At CCS, we have defined the following areas as risks as they pertain to the Coronavirus:

Risk: Inability of CCS staff to effectively service and communicate with customers

With phones trunked in Washington DC, and systems physically located offsite from our corporate headquarters, CCS staff is used to working remotely every day.  In the event that every member would need to work from home, there would be no prerequisites needed for any staff member to login and service customers from their home securely and effectively.

Risk: Inability for CCS hosted systems to maintain service level agreements

While CCS Business Solutions is a true private cloud, we do leverage a local data center for our equipment hosting.  With risk that our facilities partner is unable to service the power and cooling we receive from them, like with any natural disaster, our private cloud is replicated to Oregon every five minutes in another data center, autonomous from our primary.  All DRS units in the field are backed up to yet another technology partner and reside in Washington DC and San Jose.  With all our services, we always employ redundant hosted equipment for our solutions.

Risk: Inability for CCS staff to service customers due to personnel illness

CCS Business Solutions already has partners in place who can help in the event that our staff is ill and unavailable to work.  With Net-Assure Endpoint, we employ a 2,500 engineer Network Operation Center (NOC) with access to hardware and software engineers monitoring our systems 24x7x365.  With Net-Assure Environment, we employ an 850 engineer Security Operation Center (SOC) with access to our systems from a security standpoint.  While these two teams are our eyes and ears while we are out of the office, they are easily able to step in during business hours as well.  In the event that our staff (or a majority of our staff) becomes unavailable, we are able to engage with these teams to continue providing support to all our managed customers.  

actions you can take

  • Follow a program similar to the above approach, defining your risks for access to your systems and what to do in the event that internal personnel or partners are unavailable.
  • If you currently do not have an efficient means of working remotely, contact us to discuss how you can leverage technology to decentralize your working environment.
  • Have  multiple means of communication with staff.  Leveraging instant messaging can keep things productive while outside of the normal office setting.
  • When it comes to equipment, think of IT first.  With the current delays coming out of China, we are seeing inventory levels depleting.  Order your needed equipment as early as possible to secure it on time.

We take the potential effects of the Coronavirus and its associated risks very seriously at CCS Business Solutions, for our employees, customers, and partners.  We encourage all who interact with our company to follow the guidelines outlined by the CDC.  If you have any questions or concerns, please click on the CONTACT US below so we can be of assistance.