The impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is evolving every day. Today, 15 March 2020, the government of the Republic of Cyprus has declared the country in a state of emergency until 30 April 2020, announcing a series of measures to limit the spread of the virus and relevant consequences to public health.

Prioritizing its employees’, customers’ and partners’ health and safety, Simplex is taking its own measures, aligned with those announced by the government as well as its own business continuity policy. As such, the below measures become effective immediately and may be adapted as necessary during the evolution of the pandemic:

• The management and employees of the company will not participate in face-to-face meetings. Teleconference meetings over Cisco Webex will be scheduled instead. 
• Ad-hoc visitors to our offices will not be accepted for any reason.
• The company will operate with limited standby/emergency staff at its offices; remaining employees will be working normally but remotely from home.
• Onsite support at clients’ premises will be avoided and will only be offered for exceptional cases with all precautionary measures in place.
• Deliveries of new equipment and consumables will be strictly limited to those which would hinder our clients’ operations if they didn’t take place; remaining deliveries will take place upon the end of the emergency situation.
• Routine visits by data center colocation clients as well as service engineers will not be accepted; only single-person visits in case of emergency and strictly after prior notification inline our standard procedures will be accepted.
• Service requests, either for IT support or data center services (colocation, IaaS, etc.) will be prioritized and although our aim remains to respond to all requests promptly within the defined/contractual response times, delays may be experienced.

During these difficult circumstances, we do realize at Simplex how important technology is and our team is here to support your operations. We recognize that our data center is the backbone of the digital infrastructure for many of you and assure you that the continued operation of our facility remains a top priority. Similarly and subject to the public measures announced by the government and our specific measures mentioned above, we are ready to support all our clients with on-premises IT infrastructure.

These days that every business struggles to keep operations running while keeping its employees and customers safe, the demand for teleworking elevates. We receive numerous calls from existing and new clients asking us to assist them setting up quickly a teleworking environment for their employees. Please do not hesitate to call us to discuss how we could facilitate secure teleworking for your employees, too. We can come up with customized solutions for the individual needs of each business and also, take advantage of the great free offerings of Cisco, of which Simplex is a Premier Partner, for Cisco Webex (video conferencing), AnyConnect Secure Mobile VPN, Duo Security multi-factor authentication and Cisco Umbrella protecting users from malicious Internet destinations when they are on or off the network. For more information regarding the free offering from Cisco, please see https://www.webex.com/covid19.html and https://blogs.cisco.com/security/cisco-expands-free-security-offerings-to-help-with-rise-in-remote-workers.

For any questions you may have please do not hesitate to contact us; stay safe!