Our response and readiness for business continuity during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

This is a novel time in our history. The COVID-19 pandemic is having an impact on the health of many families, the businesses we rely upon, the health of the global economy, and the way we live our daily lives. As we all continue to navigate through these unprecedented and evolving challenges, we want you to know that Multidots is here for you and prepared to face the challenging phase.

In our more than 10 years of business, we’ve weathered the storms of the Year 2008-09 financial crisis and the recession that followed, city/state level curfew, internet outage because of curfew and fire in our office which had touched our regular office life badly, and throughout this journey, our mission of Serving People, be it our employees, our customers and our partners, remained our top priority.

All these unfortunate events taught us that ‘it’s never too late’ to kick-start the work on Business Continuity Plan. Also, we have been always kept on updating our learning from the events, which has helped us so far to remain better positioned to recover from the business interruption, financial impact, and loss of life that a natural disaster or man-made event may cause.

Having a pre-defined and well-documented business continuity plan has helped us to clearly communicate how our business will respond during such an unfortunate event — and indeed, is one of the best investments our company has made. As we address a pandemic there is no doubt - it will become a chapter in the history books. However, in this challenging phase, our commitment to Serving People will remain unchanged.

The intent of sharing our readiness in the form of a Business Continuity Plan is to provide assurance to our existing and prospective clients that Multidots is enabled to respond and ready to recover from a disruption.

People

Supporting our Dots during this period is one of the priorities and they are equally showing ownership in providing the services our clients need and expectations. We have taken all necessary actions as soon as COVID-19 has started spreading,

• To protect the physical well-being and financial security of our employees so that they are in a position to care for their health while also supporting work routine. 

• Preparing our team for remote work. At present, 100% of our global workforce is working remotely.
  
• Dots have adequate facilities like high-end internet connectivity, proper home office set-up which will help them to maintain productivity.

The commitments we have made to support and care for our Dots ensure that we are ready and equipped also to support our clients during this uncertain phase.

Backup

Be it Project, Resource or Internet backups - We Are Ready!

• As per our standard practice, we keep up to 15% of engineers on the bench. While on the bench, we utilize them for internal tools, training and research work.  We allocate these resources to live projects in case of an emergency.
  
• All the project managers & technical leaders are closely connected with the internal weekly process meeting. In case of a need for a resource, they can easily sync up with each other.
  
• We are confident to handle up to 15% of team fluctuation. In the case of greater impact, where team fluctuation reaches more than 15%, our first preference is to talk to our other ongoing projects/customers to understand their priority and check if we can release resources and serve the urgency of other projects.
  
• In the worst-case scenario, if the team fluctuation is >15%, that is a scenario where we will come back to you to find alternate solutions. We have trusted strategic partnerships with other small but skilled development agencies in India, and we are prepared to lease developers from such companies with short notice.
  
• Being a WordPress agency, we have all our developers trained to follow our best practices including, development workflow, coding standards, and advanced WordPress knowledge. Thus, our developers are easily able to swiftly, pick up the new project in between, with a quick Business Logic knowledge transfer.
  
• Daily scrum meetings are in our blood. When working in a team,  each person in the team is aware of the latest status of the project. In the scenario, when a Project Manager is unable to work, a Team Leader or Technical Analyst or other Project Manager (we have a team of 6 project managers) can take over the project in case of urgency. Daily scrum meetings allow another developer to pick up a team-mate’s task in case of short term unavailability of a developer.

Internet

All our global workforce has a high end - stable internet connectivity. Hence we face negligent to minimal work disruptions due to internet connectivity. In addition, Internet connectivity and Electricity in Large/Mega/Metro cities have been most stable and in its best phase from the last 4+ years in India and fortunately, our majority of team members are located in large cities like Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Delhi or Mumbai. Hence, internet connectivity has not been a concern.

All our employees have a stable broadband internet connection and use one of these broadbands while working remotely:

• Airtel Broadband
• GTPL Broadband
• You Broadband
• Reliance Broadband

Also, all of the team members have a backup option of 4G cellular connectivity in case their main broadband network is down. 4G is wide with good coverage.

Data Security & Protection

As a dynamic & trusted WordPress VIP Agency, our processes are fully derived to be compliant and we take ownership to maintain the safety & security of your valuable data. Integrity is our fundamental value and makes up the core of our corporate philosophy keeping us committed to center our engagement around this approach. 

Date Security is critically important to us and we believe it is important for our clients to understand how well equipped we are.

All our servers are hosted on the cloud and fully secure with

• Advanced Cloud DDoS Protection 
• Redundant cloud backups

Server Connectivity

• All staging servers can be managed through VPN only
• VPN connection rights are given to authorized Dots

Tools

Our process/tools are designed to support remote work.  For Project Collaboration we use Basecamp or Teamwork which are on the cloud. It is easy to assign access to the new developer. Our Development workflow is integrated with Github CI/CD workflow, and our staging servers are in the cloud. Thus, this can be assigned easily with the right permissions.

Below are the tools we actively utilize to keep a track of all project-related conversations:

• Slack -  As per our process, for all running projects we create a project-specific channel i.e. "prj-<project_name>". We also invite our Client on the same slack channel. This way all the project related conversation stays synced.
• Basecamp - PMS to document/collaborate all project-related communication.
• Teamwork -  For Internal Task Management and Issue Tracking for all the projects. So any new developer can ramp up.
• Zoom - Real-time Video Conferencing
• Dialpad -  For Leaders/Project Manager Direct Phone support
• Github - Project Source code and Version Control Management
• GSuit - At Multidots we use Google GSuit for our needs like Mail, Google Documents which is easily available to our team without any downtime.

Our bit in the COVID-19 phase

The following are some actions being taken to protect our clients, our people, facilities, and workloads.

• We are extending the validity of support bundles for the clients who have purchased or willing to buy.
  
• Dots are happy and flexible to adjust work hours to meet our clients’ new routine and work schedule if any.
  
• Our HR & Operations team is continuously monitoring the situation and working tirelessly to help and educate our team to stay safe, healthy, and motivated.
  
• We have created a Special Support Squad for our Dots which will be there for the team to provide morale to finance support.

Without a doubt, our greatest common achievement is how we have all reacted in challenging times. Dots, clients, partners, vendors, and support staff have all contributed tremendously to keep our operations running. 

Normalcy will return. These are testing times, but our small Dots community has, we firmly believe, met that test so far.