The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus has dominated the news lately, and it has quickly had a major and disruptive impact on life and business around the world. As this illness has spread, cities are facing the prospect of school closures, quarantines, supply chain issues and much more. As of this writing, it is still impossible to estimate the full impact of this outbreak.
Our hearts go out to those affected. The health and safety of our customers and employees remains a top priority. In times like these, we wanted to share how we are fully prepared to continue serving our worldwide customer base with their mission-critical applications. In particular, this outbreak has underscored the importance of online services in a crisis, ranging from telework to online shopping and financial services. We’ve provided consistent uninterrupted service and support through wildfires, polar vortexes, earthquakes, and other major events, and we’re equipped to serve you through this latest and evolving situation as well.
Here, we would like to share the ways we’re prepared by design for situations like these, and why Service Objects will always be there for you and your data.
A disaster-hardened infrastructure
Our services are hosted using geographically diverse, redundant data centers in the Eastern, Western, and Midwest regions of the United States, with a fourth center coming online shortly in Las Vegas. This gives us the ability to fail over to alternate centers to ensure continuous uptime, while ensuring optimum performance.
This diagram gives an example of how our data centers respond to multiple input sources in real time, with failover capabilities from one or more backup data centers if needed.
These physically fortified centers are staffed 24/7/365, and are equipped with redundant generators and climate control in the event of power outages. They also feature bank-grade levels of security, including electronic and biometric access control, hardened Windows servers and continuous monitoring and oversight. You can find out more about our security and infrastructure on our web site at https://www.serviceobjects.com/support/security
Being prepared at a human level
Of course, delivering mission-critical services involves human as well as computing resources. We have long taken steps to ensure staffing continuity and customer access to our team, including the following:
- 25% of our full-time staff work remotely, based here in the United States
- Our entire staff is trained and equipped to work remotely if needed, and we test our teams’ preparedness on a routine basis through real-life drills.
- Many of our team members are crossed-trained to take on multiple responsibilities if needed.
- Our business phone systems fail-over to key members’ personal phones, if ever needed.
All of these steps are designed to keep our operations running smoothly in the event of a disruption, and provide multiple levels of human redundancy for all of our business functions.
A guarantee of service
We are unique within this industry for providing our customers with the only financially-backed service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.999% uptime for our products – which translates to no more than 26 seconds of downtime per month, although our goal is always zero downtime. We take this guarantee very seriously, and monitor our products using state-of-the-art tools for both speed and uptime. In addition to this performance commitment, we are equally committed to providing support on a 24/7/365 basis for all of our customers.
These are some of the steps we have taken to make sure people can count on our services whenever they are needed. Particularly in times of uncertainty, one thing you can always depend on is that Service Objects has our customers covered.
