Sunday, March 15, 2020

COVID-19 – Closed Offices

At Telspace we put our employees, clients, community and country first in everything we do. In line with this, we have decided to close our physical offices and all our staff will be working remotely. By doing so, we can hopefully reduce the risk of COVID-19 further spreading. This post outlines why we are doing this and how this will affect our day to day operations and community engagements. 

Why?

Surely this is an overreaction given we are company with less than a 100 people? Aren’t we just spreading more fear / panic? No and no. Won’t this result in a negative financial impact to Telspace? Potentially yes, due to factors outside of our control, but there are more important things happening right now and we will always ensure that our services meet the highest quality standards our clients have come to expect.

We want to be proactive in protecting ourselves and everyone else and therefore we call on companies in our industry and any other companies outside our industry that can do the same to follow suit, prevention is better than cure as the saying goes. 

Telspace Conference 2020

Our client only conference was scheduled to take place on the 31st of March and we were expecting a large number of attendees. We are excited to inform you that our conference will still be going ahead, albeit in a digital format as follows:

  • Our talks will now be given virtually and will be accessible to all our clients to log onto / participate in. 
  • All swag / gifts that were going to be given out at the conference will instead be kept and distributed to clients once the pandemic has been resolved.

Key Account Managers

We love the personal touch that comes from meeting face to face with our clients, but with COVID-19 the less in-person meetings the safer. As such all our sales / key account managers will now be required to conduct meetings / catchups virtually via Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom etc.  For more sensitive conversations / discussions, we would encourage clients to use platforms such as Signal instead of requiring that we come onsite for the meetings. 

Security Assessments / Penetration Tests

The good news is that we are prepared for a remote working scenario and therefore will still be able to provide you with uninterrupted services of the highest quality. All of our assessments can be conducted remotely provided we are given VPN access to the client’s environments. Alternatively, we can provide clients with our own TelspaceConnect Boxes, which is essentially a box that allows us to connect remotely to a client’s network to conduct the assessment, just plug it into the network where it’s required and we will do the rest. 

For more specialised assessments, we are happy to work with clients to find the best way to conduct the assessment. 

Report presentations will be done virtually via Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom etc.  For more sensitive presentations, we would encourage clients to use platforms such as Signal instead of requiring that we come onsite for the presentations.  

Training

All of our training can be given virtually, in terms of assisting students with any issues they may have with the practical aspects of the training, a remote connection to the student’s computer / host would be required. 

Conclusion

We would like to wish everyone the very best during this difficult time and we hope that you will be safe. We are confident that if we all work together proactively in preventing the spread of COVID-19, we will collectively be able to defeat it.

Dino, Manny and Tim (Telspace Management Team)