Kinetic’s Business Continuity Plan
Coronavirus, COVID-19

We want to reassure you that Kinetic has a robust disaster recovery plan in place and we are prepared to ensure business continuity. This communication explains our current plan. We will continue to monitor the situation and advise you if anything changes.

The second part explains the impact of homeworking and has specific points to consider for your use of our software.

With reference to COVID-19 specifically, we are taking the following specific actions:

  • Our teams are working from home. We are not holding face-to-face meetings unless absolutely necessary. We have facilities to hold remote meetings.
  • We are following all government guidelines as and when they evolve.
  • Colleagues returning from travel, either business or personal, from a high-risk area are being asked to work from home for 14 days irrespective of symptoms.
  • Colleagues who feel unwell are being asked to work from home for 14 days.

Support

We do not currently foresee any impact on the continuity of our support service, but should the situation change we will notify you immediately. Our team has a contingency plan for homeworking. We will re-allocate other staff to support if needed to provide ongoing cover if there is higher than usual sickness levels.

Please read the information provided further on about using our software and about our arrangements for providing support if we have to work from home.

Onsite training and consultancy

We are seeing an impact on the delivery of some services. We are already experiencing cancellations to onsite training and related services due to self-isolation within our team and with our customers. If we experience higher than usual sickness levels in our support team then we will re-assign staff to that function; this will reduce our capacity to provide training and consultancy services.

Other services such as custom developments

At present, there is no impact. We foresee an impact if the virus spreads and we suffer from higher than usual sickness levels. The impact of such a situation will be that the delivery of work will be delayed.

Our physical offices are currently closed to all but essential use

We have asked our staff to work from home and are continuing to provide a full service for support and related services. Both the Milton Keynes and Ludlow offices are closed for all but essential use. We are prioritising the support service making sure we have adequate staffing levels; this may mean a reduction in our capacity to provide other services.

If you are a customer and run Room Service or Kx using your own servers and infrastructure

We have received reports from some universities that their university infrastructure is unable to support large numbers of home-workers. You may find that, if you are asked to work from home, you are not able to connect to your University systems including Kx. Please discuss with your IT team.

If you are a customer and we host your Room Service or Kx software

Room Service hosted customers should be able to work from home without any changes. If you cannot, contact the Room Service help desk.

KxHosting customers (running Kx) may find that their existing in-house arrangements do not support working from home or are not capable of supporting a large volume of homeworkers.  It is possible that you will require a Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN connection for homeworkers. A P2S VPN is a gateway connection that lets you create a secure connection to your virtual network from an individual client computer, typically used for remote workers. Please check with your IT team to confirm whether or not you require our assistance to provide a P2S VPN for homeworking and then contact our help desk.

Arrangements for our staff

Our phones will continue to operate on the same numbers. However, staff may be working from home.

Most of the software we use for development and support is cloud-based. This makes it easy for our teams to work from home.  We already practice homeworking across the company and so we are comfortable that our infrastructure is adequate. We have made special provision for our support teams, ensuring they all have laptops or computers at home which can connect to our office via a secure VPN connection. Our VPN gateway is capable of supporting all staff working from home. By connecting via VPN, they can continue to provide remote support using secure connections.

If you require us to use a dedicated/custom solution for remote support which requires us to maintain a dedicated PC or a physical secure key device, then you may find we are unable to connect in the same manner or with the same ease.

We have received reports from some universities that their university infrastructure is unable to support large numbers of home-workers. You may find that, if you are asked to work from home, you are not able to connect to your University systems including Kx. Please discuss with your IT team.

COVID-19 Hub

With so much going on in the world right now, we want to help our community as much as possible, as well as recognise our customers' incredible support and achievements. From webinars, customer stories, our continuity plan and much more, you can find all COVID-19 related resources here.

General background

The UK Government has published guidance to employers and businesses about coronavirus, COVID-19 here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-to-employers-and-businesses-about-covid-19

Do you have any questions?

If you have any other questions that have not been covered above, please send us an email at info@kineticsoftware.com.