COVID-19: Taking action to secure long-term continuity of vital infrastructure

Mitigation of service provision risks

Resolving disruptions

Our services (digital connectivity via fiber-optic and datacenter services) run virtually autonomous, provided there are no disruptions. Our business continuity plan therefore aims to focus all staff and resources on quickly resolving disruptions and informing our customers in the event of reduced availability of employees.

Contractors

Another risk we mitigate is a decrease in availability at our contractors. Here, too, we ensure that in the event of reduced availability of capacity, the focus is on resolving disruptions instead of constructing new connections. To this end, we have made agreements with contractors who normally only construct new connections for us to shift their deployment to the disruptions service, should this be necessary.

Access to locations

We have used our good contacts with central and local authorities to ensure that if it is safe and possible to do so, mechanics and engineers can gain access to the relevant sites in the event of outages and thus continue to carry out their work. In doing so, we will, of course, respect any instructions given by the authorities.

Inventories

Regarding inventories, we have been successful in preventing shortages in close coordination with our suppliers by making additional arrangements and possibly purchasing additional inventories. Agreements have been made with suppliers of business-critical resources to secure stocks for Eurofiber. We do not currently foresee any major risks in this area in the short or medium term.

Network and datacenter capacity

There is no risk of reduced bandwidth availability. Both our backbone and customer connections have sufficient capacity to cope with large peaks in usage, for example due to an increase in the number of remote workers. The same applies to the capacity of our datacenters. High bandwidth connections and solid cloud solutions are our core business and we are proud to be able to make our contribution to limiting the economic and social damage caused by COVID-19. 

Contamination of employees and relations

All our employees work at home during the crisis, unless working on location is strictly necessary due to the nature of their work. All employees have all the necessary facilities to work from home. These facilities, including a (VPN) connection and auxiliary equipment, meet the requirements for large numbers of employees working from home at the same time. This is now proving itself in practice.Until further notice we do not receive any visitors at our office locations, nor do our employees attend meetings, congresses or other gatherings that are not strictly necessary for maintaining our service level.. All other appointments are postponed or converted into online meetings. The same applies to appointments between Eurofiber employees working at locations in different countries.

Closure of locations

We have a specific protocol in place that is applied to inform designated stakeholders, according to government guidelines, in case of an COVID-19 related incident. If an employee is infected at one of our office locations, we will close this location for a period of two to four days. During this closure, the location will be cleaned. The consequences of temporary closure are limited due to the remote working facilities. If an employee is infected in one of our datacenters, we will not close the location as this will interrupt service provision. In that case, the location will be cleaned, and the staff will be temporarily replaced.

Also read: How we serve society during the crisis