To all clients, partners, and vendors,
ManhattanTechSupport has been closely monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) since the very beginning of this year. As a company based in Manhattan supporting a wide variety of clients, technology platforms and geographical areas, it has always been critical that we are prepared for full business continuity operations in the event of an emergency or a disaster. We take the ability to support our strategic partnership base of clients extremely seriously regardless of the situation or scenario.
- Much like our recommendations to our clients in strategic meetings together, our technical monitoring, maintenance, productivity and remote access line of business applications are deployed in a geographically redundant cloud infrastructure. Our business operations do not depend on our physical office locations
- All employees are outfitted with a full array of mobile operational hardware and software as needed. The entirety of our business’ strategic capacity is built around the idea of an easily decentralized workforce
- If you have not yet seen our announcement, we have recently opened a secondary physical office location in Florida for remote support, monitoring, and development staff. This is in addition to employees which already work remotely from various parts of the continental United States across various time zones
Business continuity goes far beyond the concept of “having good backups” that can be restored if needed. This also includes having a plan for how employees can essentially perform their jobs remotely which includes (but is not limited to) equipment, software and remote access needs. The plan for any given company is completely dependent on the industry and the physical onsite or remote work that is performed. Do users need peripherals to do their job fully? Are printers, scan guns, check issuance hardware, device X required for a critical task? The best business continuity plan is to build out operational capacity in small sets of contingencies so that significant events only impact certain components of the business and adjustments can be made without major interruption. A mobile-capable workforce with secured access of portable devices to cloud communication best satisfies this action plan in most scenarios.
In our opinion, one of the most overlooked concerns of this incidence is to maintain technical security of the business. Many organizations, in an attempt to rapidly deploy a solution for remote work (previously overlooked), have been desperate to show something and want to sacrifice security for this temporary need. This represents an extremely high degree of risk as there will most certainly be malicious actors in the wake of these events looking to seize upon hastily devised solutions – personal laptops without device management, remote access lacking VPN connectivity, a lax multifactor authentication standard, etc. It is critical that any solution is properly engineered and deployed in a technically sound manner. This line of thinking, from our security division Kaytuso, is at the heart of our thorough review of new client continuity plans, and the reason for our “think first, then act” mindset.
MTS regularly has staff working from home or out in the field without any fanfare. While we have fully tested our team’s ability to function outside of the office, for us this is simply business as usual. At this time we still have technicians and engineers staffed in our primary physical location in Midtown Manhattan to be deployed as needed for onsite visits. We are continually monitoring the situation from the relevant health and government authorities and we have no current plans to completely stop our onsite physical presence in central New York City unless absolutely necessary. All other cites we support, can expect onsite visits to be dependent on those areas situation at the time. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during this time while we prioritize technical support and repairs over new scopes of work, and client continuity needs over less critical wants. Our dispatch team is working diligently to ensure that the influx of technical and hardware/software procurement requests in relation to this situation are dealt with in a timely and responsible manner. Please understand that as the situation evolves, we may need to adjust our priorities to better serve all customers.
We highly value your trust in our team to deliver your organization’s strategic technical planning and your operational IT capacity, and we are here to answer any questions or concerns you may have. ManhattanTechSupport is committed to providing the same high level of support and service to our clients in these situations as we do in our day to day relationship together.
Respectfully,