COVID-19 continuity and strategy statement

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Edge Networks has remained at the forefront of ensuring stability and reliance during this uncertain time and has taken a multitude of actions to manage, mitigate and monitor the evolving situation as it develops.

As the situation and concern around the COVID-19 outbreak moves into unprecedented territory, we are ensuring the virus has minimal impact on the services we provide to our customers, their networks and clients, at a time when they are under increased pressure and risk, while ensuring the health and safety of both our staff and our clients remains the highest priority.

Key Worker Reassurance
In light of the ever-increasing quarantine and lock-down directives being put in place out in the UK, we are ensuring our staff are unencumbered and remain effective, as telecommunications and networking infrastructure remains critical to society and the economy.

As such, key operations and field engineers are now issued with key worker documentation packs containing agreed company directives, partner supporting statements and clear contact information, aligning to the governmental mandates that will be monitored and policed.

Business Continuity Strategy
Edge Networks are here to support your systems and networks, mitigating risks and adding assurance to yourselves and your customers’ services.

As a result, our services, SLAs and business operations are designed to monitor, withstand and protect against a complete range of expected and unexpected events, subsequently allowing alleviation of risk to our customers, from reduced travel and operations resource requirements through to complete disaster recovery control for incidents such as this.

The following measures are implemented as part of our standard service offerings and business continuity strategy, and are therefore aligned to the required actions brought about in response to the ongoing outbreak:

  1. Increased sanitization of offices including daily spot-checks and EOD wipe downs.
  2. Increased monitoring of staff sickness and hygiene levels.
  3. Implementation of weekly tracked staff health checks, including weight, heart rate, blood pressure and O2 max.
  4. Staff access to Working From Home functions in place allowing remote workers, should localised travels be limited or individual staff members feel unwell.
  5. Travel restrictions are in place, with non-critical in-person meetings with other parties being postponed until further notice, and the promotion of remote WebEx conference calls in place as an alternative where possible.
  6. Preparation of Disaster Recovery locations in the event of further restrictions.
  7. Employees with travel history outside of the United Kingdom in the last 14-days are required to Work From Home for a period of 14-days to monitor their health upon their return.

 Enhanced Service Offerings
In line with the constantly expanding government control measures, we want to ensure both our partners and customers are aware of the evolving steps we are taking to ensure daily operations remain unaffected by this pandemic. As such, we are offering increased support and services during this difficult period to assist in keeping national communication infrastructure operational at a time when it is needed more than ever:

To ensure this, we are taking the following strengthened measures and enhance services:

  1. Expanded Working From Home directive and Core Operation Isolation as a continuation of our overall Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Strategy. This is to ensure our core operational areas, equipment and engineers remain isolated and unaffected by unnecessary risks, allowing them to continue running business critical operations such as rapid-response services and expedited managed logistics.
    • Increased pro-active monitoring of customer networks we would normally support re-actively, ensuring network supervision is unaffected while allowing greater flexibility and reduced resource mitigation for the partner teams usually tasked with handling this work.
    • Increased smart hands offerings, due to our early precautionary measures to ensure we can maintain our service offerings, ensuring our ability to be reactive in disaster recovery situations. We are offering access to our dedicated field force nationwide for customers with limited local resource or field coverage, with the capability to ensure service reliance in and across multiple technologies.
    • Increased urgency for undertaking of remote Service Review Meetings with our partners and customers, in many cases bringing scheduled SRMs forward to ensure transparent alignment and any additional risks are discussed as the result of the outbreak, as part of our service offerings.
    • Increased use of own direct delivery services from expected reduction in freight options provided by couriers at this time, safeguarding delivery effectiveness and allowing SLA deadlines to be met regardless of national courier network ability.
  2. Continuation of increased sanitisation in operational environments in the workplace, including:
    • Mandatory spraying/wiping down of received goods and immediate disposal of waste packaging.
    • Cleansing of all goods being dispatched by ourselves ahead of packing.
    • Utilisation of P3 breathing respirators and disposable gloves in confined locations, such as our reference laboratory where extended close proximity to equipment and others cannot be otherwise avoided.

Conclusion
We are continuing to closely monitor the situation and understand the current outbreak is a growing concern for everyone. Be assured that Edge Networks is here to safeguard the systems and networks of our partners and customers remain fully supported during this time, in line our services which are designed to monitor, withstand and protect against detrimental events such as these.

On behalf of all the team here at Edge Networks, while we are fundamentally here to help when possible, we hope that everyone is taking care of themselves and each other in this difficult time.

Following this, as part of our business continuity plan with our key partners and client base, we would like to understand what your contingency plans are – if you have not already done so, please email covid-19@edgenetworks.uk with your response statement.