Your health and the health of your business are important to us.
Cyber-NY has taken steps to ensure continuity of business operations during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in New York City and throughout the world. In over 20 years of operation, Cyber-NY has learned the lessons of the importance of business continuity planning in the event of a major business disruption. Our experience was gained during the dark days of 911 when our offices were inaccessible for several weeks. In 2003, we saw the impact of the historic Northeast blackout, and more recently, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which saw major swaths of our city closed and inaccessible for nearly a week, including our Manhattan office. Here are the lessons we have learned to avoid disruption of services during a crises.
How Cyber-NY maintains business continuity during unexpected disruptions
- Remote Work: Cyber-NY practices telecommuting and remote work by requiring all staff to work remotely a minimum of one day per week. This ensures all of our remote working capabilities are intact and in practice.
- Mobile Culture: Laptops, not desktops. For more than 15 years, we have moved development to laptops with external monitors for portability, remote work, and mitigation of damages due to theft, fire, or natural disaster. This eliminates the need for emergency battery back-ups or loss of work due to temporary power outage.
- Cloud Based: All of our internal systems have migrated to cloud infrastructure over the last decade. All hosting is maintained in distributed networks and Amazon AWS. Our file transfer, storage, code repository, billing infrastructure, project management, software, and phone system are all cloud based. We can quite literally operate our business from anywhere in the world and be up and running same day without disruption of service.
- Paperless: Several years ago, Cyber-NY went paperless for all aspects of our business including payments and business documentation. Electronic billing ensures our business can maintain operations without receiving traditional mail. Our invoices or payments received by check are no longer necessary and do not become additional viral vectors. We do not require access to a main office to retrieve documentation or contracts required for business operations.
- Office Health: It is our policy to work remotely at the first sign of respiratory health issue. Staff members are encouraged to work remotely to prevent the spread of common cold and flu and to take time off from work to recover.
- Redundancy: Our teams are built to cover multiple clients to ensure developers can cover tasks for each other in the event of health related outages. We maintain relationships with external development and IT resources in the event that additional coverage is necessary.
- Documentation: There is no single point of contact for information or access control. We maintain online systems for access of all accounts and client specific networks and technologies to ensure we do not get "locked out" of a project due to illness of a team member.
- Communication: Cyber-NY maintains open communication with scheduled daily planning and 24/7 accessible conference line for checkins. In the event of an unexpected disruption event, a daily checkin has already been scheduled to regroup. Our staff is located across four states with development on east coast and west coast so communication due to grid or cellular disruption will not impact the entire organization.
Responsible planning. Direct action.
We believe that a widespread outbreak that threatens business continuity is still unlikely at this time but take the risk to your business seriously. For now, this is a reminder to take action, be prepared, and look out for the health of our team, our clients, and our community. If you feel the start of a cold or flu, or have an elevated temperature, see your physician and consider working remotely. Keep work surfaces clean and wash hands frequently. For additional guidance on coronavirus mitigation in the workplace, refer to the CDC interim guidance for businesses and employers. Stay safe and healthy!
