Coronavirus Update 12 March 2020

Thursday, 12 March 2020

Given the growing concerns around Coronavirus (Covid-19), our priority at Reference Point continues to be the health and safety of our staff, customers and system users. As a company, Reference Point has long-standing, fully documented, business continuity procedures in place which include strategies for coping with pandemic outbreaks to ensure the services we provide are maintained. These procedures have been reviewed in the last few weeks in the light of the Coronavirus outbreak and we would like to reassure our customers and suppliers that we have strong contingency plans in place as follows.

Remote working for our staff
Throughout our business we have gone over and above the government guidelines to protect our staff and, as you would expect, we have highly-secure remote working capabilities in place to enable any of our staff to work from home should the need arise. This capability can be scaled upwards as required to enable all our staff to work from home with full access to all our systems in the event of having to close our offices for a period. Should need arise, our telephony, video conferencing and electronic messaging systems are fully accessible to all our staff whilst working remotely and we expect to continue to deliver uninterrupted support to our customers.

Remote working for our customers
We will do everything we can to support our customers should they need to change their working practices in order to work from home and will, where necessary and possible, look to modify our existing system configurations and internal business processes to ensure our clients are able to access their systems easily and securely from home should the need arise.

System resilience and availability
The technology-driven solutions we have supplied our customers over the last 10 years are cloud-based with high resilience and redundancy built in. This includes auto fail-over and self-healing capabilities to ensure automatic availability of the services even in the event of multiple technical failures. As such, these systems do not require 24/7 on-site staff presence to continue operating. In addition to this, our automated service monitoring and alerting systems will continue to be fully operational and accessible to our infrastructure team, who have remote access to all systems and will be able to carry out all usual maintenance operations, as well as dealing with any issues (minor or major) that might arise with the same level of efficiency as when working from the office.

Staff travel and customer visits
It is always our aim to provide the highest level of service and, during this period of uncertainty, we will endeavour to continue to attend or host client meetings where necessary. However, we will balance this with the common-sense precaution of avoiding large gatherings and minimising travel where possible and make use of online meeting services instead to prevent the risk of spreading the virus unnecessarily.


I truly hope that our customers’ and suppliers’ businesses continue to flourish over the uncertain months ahead and, if there is anything we can do to help, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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