Attollo preparedness for COVID-19
This guidance has been planned and implemented in alignment with Microsoft’s guidance published in the Office 365 Message Center on March 4th 2020: Microsoft 365 preparedness for COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and guidance regarding best practices for Microsoft Teams – MC205458
Attollo takes a broad approach to service continuity, including potential effects of an outbreak such as COVID-19. While there is currently no foreseen impact to Attollo’s operation of our services, we wanted to provide some detail regarding our preparedness should the situation change. Recognising customers will have plans in place for enabling remote work in a situation like this, we are providing guidance regarding best practices under the “Actions you can take” section that will help maximize the benefits of Microsoft 365.
Specific to COVID-19, we are providing an outline of key preparedness activities to ensure continued service delivery during this event. The three areas of focus during any situation that challenges normal operations are as follows:
- Impact to systems – does the event have a potential impact on our systems used to deliver and support Attollo Intranet?
- Impact to location – are the locations from which we deliver and support services effected and what is our response?
- Impact to people – are we prepared should there be impact to the individuals responsible for delivering service to our customers?
While the following provides the high-level efforts in each of these areas, there are significantly more activities that relate to our business continuity efforts for Attollo that are beyond the scope of this communication.
Impact to systems
First and foremost there are no known impacts to Attollo Intranet services. Heightened awareness is in place for the following areas:
Service scale and operations – One of the benefits of a cloud service is the ability to scale dynamically. So far, we have seen little additional scale on our services as users seem to be accessing Attollo Services equally whether they are at home or in the office. Due to our reliance on CDN and Cloud Services we can support a much larger use-base that we currently have, should employee engagement with the intranet increase. We are also confident of Microsoft’s efforts to manage scale of Office 365 and Teams to facilitate a larger usage on the core platform to serve Attollo Intranet.
Supporting systems – A general principle of cloud service operations is remote management and administration. We see no effect to our ability to manage the systems used to support Attollo Intranet, and have confirmed adequate capacity for staff to work remotely as required.
Impact to location
Our services are designed for remote administration with a high reliance on Microsoft Azure Services.
Microsoft employs a security first approach to administering Attollo Intranet service. Each engineering resource that is accountable for managing the service has the ability to securely administer the service without direct access to the corporate location.
People – We believe we have enough resource to cover any sickness that may occur in the organisation. If any person needs to self-isolate then they would have the ability to continue working from their home location. Should a number of staff get sick, we believe we have coverage to take on that burden to continue the operation of Attollo intranet, but scale back development of new functionality and limit deployments to our production branches to safe-times when we can ensure sufficient engineering effort to manage issues. We are in the process of checking and updating our Standard Operating Procedures to ensure they are up-to-date and accurate and understood by all required personnel.
Actions you can take:
- Follow a similar program to the above ensuring consideration for your systems, people and work locations.
- If your organization is looking to accelerate its move to Microsoft Teams, overview information regarding Teams can be found here.
- If you do have an increase in remote work, follow Microsoft best practices to maximize your use of Teams.
- Ensure your organization’s network is prepared to support the use of Teams and Attollo Intranet by following these recommendations.