For ETI-NET Business Continuity Plans (BCP) have moved from being a test to being activated for real!

First of all, we wish that all of our customers, employees and their families are safe and continue to be healthy. ETI-NET is taking every precaution to keep all of our employees safe and will continue to support our customers as usual. These are challenging times for all of us and ETI-NET is cognizant of the role the company plays in ensuring our customers mission critical applications remain supported by our team.

Have you come to that moment when you realize that a pandemic has arrived? Cities and counties and even countries have issued stay-in-place, even lock-down ordinances where suddenly you are facing a new way of doing business. Not just with your interaction with customers but in the way you interact with your own workforce! Gone are the friendly water-cooler chats about last night’s hockey match and gone too are “Donut Fridays!” As we wait for the world to become more predictable, it has made us consider how well we function in situations pulled directly from a Hollywood script.

As we expect is the case with many NonStop vendors, it all comes back to the plans you have put in place for such occurances and it’s all about business continuity in the face of crisis. While parts of the world have had to deal with floods even as other parts wrestled with wildfires, the arrival of a pandemic was not something any of us forecasted and yet, our plans for business continuity were triggered all the same. “For several years now, we have developed a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and over the course of these years, we have done several exercises,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “This is an important aspect of our business as we are very much active participants in many of our larger customers plans and together we have participated in annual reviews.” At ETI, after all, we provide backup software in support of the mission critical applications to ensure that these customers never stop.

“Another way to look at this, is that our BCP is truly an extension of our customers’ BCP plans,” said Tétreault. “And today, it’s not another test: With the COVID-19 crisis, theses BCPs are now being activated in real life  and our BCP is working perfectly, it allows all our employees to be able to work from home and be safe.” The transition to working remotely happened quickly and while there may be downsides for some industries when it comes to knowledge workers, such as we have here at ETI, it is working well.

Key to this successful transition has been our BCP and in this regard, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the NonStop community that ETI has duplicate copies of this plan held within operations as well as our compliance team. “One copy of the BCP is with me here as part of our business operations,” said Tétreault, “while the other is with our ISO Compliance Manager.” Assima, an ETI-NET sister company, became ISO27001 certified in early 2020. This ensures security best practices for both product development and delivery. In order to gain and maintain this ISO certification, we hired a Compliance Manager.

As a consequence we are now using ISO27001 standards that we implemented as security best practices across all our portfolio companies. “It’s only natural for the Compliance Manager to be in possession of our BCP as outages can come from not just pandemics as we are dealing with today but from attacks on the integrity of our systems and networks.” Before we gained ISO27001 certication we had certain security standards that we had to comply with, that relied on having a BCP as our relationship with our NonStop customers often included SLAs where our preparedness was a factor.

In our Montreal Office we went 100% into the pandemic mode as soon as it was suggested by the authorities while our European offices did it about a week earlier. We are 100% operational remotely thanks to our BCP and our awesome IT Team who was able to deploy it with very minimal impact on our operations. None of us here at ETI could have possibly anticipated the presence of a global pandemic but being in the business of ensuring mission critical applications can continue operations no matter what type of disaster is encountered demonstrating that we were able to use our own IT infrastructure in this manner was simply an extension of what we know our NonStop users expected from us.

Should you be interested in knowing more about how our back-up software contributes to ensuring operations can continues in events such as we are witnessing today with the spread of COVID-19  then give us a call or simply email us – we would be happy to talk with you any time! Look for us too at upcoming events even if they will likely only be taking place in the Fall as we will continue to support NonStop events wherever they are held around the globe!

Where to find us?

• HPE APAC MCS Bootcamp (postponed , date TBD)
• HPE MCS NonStop Thailand event (postponed , date TBD)
• HPE MCS NonStop Indonesia event (postponed , date TBD)
• HPE NonStop HotSpot / IT-Symposium (Berlin) (TBD – likely, September 2020)
• CTUG (Mississauga, Ontario) (September 23 – 24, 2020)
• NonStop TBC (Burlingame) (November 16 – 18, 2020)

… with more venues and dates to follow as events are confirmed.

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501

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