News

Coronavirus

Over the coming weeks and months coronavirus is going to have an increasing impact on everyone's day-to-day lives. We wanted to take a moment to just clarify how we forsee Freethought continuing to provide what are increasingly critical online services to our customers.

Kieran Jones, Edward Dore

Mar 16, 2020 • 3 min read

It is inescapable at the moment, every conversation, every news story, every other Tweet and Facebook post - as a planet we are facing an unprecedented challenge in modern times with the continuing spread of coronavirus (AKA SARS-CoV-2) and the associated COVID-19 disease. Over the coming weeks and months it is going to have an increasing impact on our day to day lives. We wanted to take a moment to just clarify how we forsee Freethought continuing to provide what are increasingly critical online services to our customers.

Support

We do not envisage any problems with continuing to provide support to our customers, even if we become unwell. As a company we are very capable and indeed used to working from home and we have no problems at all in that regard. We will continue to answer support tickets and respond to enquiries as we always have in hopefully the same expedient manner.

Should we become too unwell, you may find that we are unable to accept telephone calls for the simple reason that we're not able to speak on the phone. But we will continue to have email, live chat, and social media as avenues to obtain support.

Monitoring

Our core network and services are monitored 24/7/365 from multiple geographic locations and will continue to be. We will continue to work to keep services operational as we always have and again do not anticipate any problems whatsoever in this regard, so you can rely on us to maintain service availability as usual.

Desktop Support

For our managed services customers where we provide in-person desktop, server, and network support, we will not be carrying out routine visits for the time being so as to minimise the chances of exposure to coronavirus. We will continue to provide the same level of remote support and monitoring that we always have, but this will not extend to in-person support unless there is a critical failure which is impacting your business.

Remote Hands & Data Centre Access

Majority of the physical work on our network and server infrastructure is carried out by data centre technicians, so if they become unwell then some requests may take longer than usual or non-urgent work may need to be postponed. The extent of any impact is unknown at present, but if you envisage any tasks that will need remotes hands input in the near future, then our advice would be to either bring those tasks forward if possible or postpone them for the time being.

Likewise, data centre access either for our customers or for Freethought employees is likely to be impacted at some point. Unless absolutely critical, we are limiting travel at present in order to minimise any risk of exposure to coronavirus. As such, our staff are not going to be attending any of our data centres for the time being, except to resolve any service affecting issues. This means that more complex remote hands tasks which are usually carried out by Freethought will need to be postponed until further notice. Similarly, at some point the data centres may restrict third party access in order to minimise the risk to their staff, although no such policy has been announced as yet. It would be prudent to assume that data centre access may not be possible at some times.

Lincoln office

At this time we are not operating from our Lincoln office, nor are we accepting visitors. Whilst we ordinarily love to meet with our customers in order to minimise risk of exposure to coronavirus we felt it best to politely decline visitors.

Need advice?

If you are need heping getting yourself or your staff working remotely then get in touch and we'd be glad to assist you.

We've got a wide array of services and experience that we can use to get you and your business online from homes. Whether you need help accessing your email at home, or a rapid setup of a cloud phone system so staff can take business phone calls remotely, give us a call and we'll do everything we can to help.

Questions?

These are unprecedented times, if you have any questions or concerns please don't hesitate to get in touch on 03300 882130 or email support@freethought.uk and we will do our best to provide whatever answers we can.