Blackbird Outlines Short-Term Company Plan in Face of Coronavirus

With the recent developments in the Coronavirus outbreak, Blackbird CEO Ian McDonough has released a statement regarding the company’s next steps:

The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to dominate the news, with major implications for global public health. It is also causing significant economic and operational disruption across the world.

At Blackbird, we have been preparing for the escalation of the crisis for several weeks and this notice is to act as reassurance that we have those plans in place.

I wanted to assure you that in respect of the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak we are focused on: the health and welfare of both our clients and staff and business continuity to support clients in all scenarios.

I am therefore writing to share with you some of the specific actions that we have taken:

Prior Preparation
As a cloud native platform, we are very well placed to respond quickly and be able to work remotely. A robust approach to operational effectiveness is integral to our business and we have been prepared for abnormal events for some time through a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan.

Our BCP identifies the requirements that would be needed for each function of the business to operate under a wide range of scenarios and is kept under constant review. These scenarios include natural disasters, acts of terrorism, data breaches, power and transport failures and major sickness outbreaks such as pandemics.

Operational Resilience

Our core proprietary Blackbird cloud video technology and additional complementary infrastructure ensure that the business is both robust and adaptable to be able to cope with significant and potentially disruptive events.

• all staff have the ability to work from home if required and can remotely access our systems within a secure IT environment
• all customers are able to be fully supported 24/7 by staff working from home
• new and expansion deployments of Blackbird to customers and prospects can be done remotely by staff working from home
• client content in Blackbird format is held across multiple data centres and has always been remotely managed. We have sought and received confirmation of the ability for the data centres to continue operating in all eventualities including their staff being able to work remotely from home

Employee and Client Safety
The health, safety and well being of all of our staff and clients is of the paramount importance to us. We have been in regular contact with all staff.

From Thursday 11th March all staff who can work from home have been instructed to do so. This will be 90% plus of the workforce.

Until further notice, there will be no face-to-face meetings with existing or prospective customers. All meetings will take place remotely.

The coronavirus outbreak is clearly an evolving situation both in terms of infection and the impact on business. While we cannot predict when the outbreak will have peaked and starts to subside we hope the disruption will be short lived.

The next few weeks may mean some drastic changes to the way businesses operate and should you require expansion, increased capacity or new users added to your Blackbird instances then please give us some notice as I am sure you can understand this is a busy time.

In the meantime, we want to reassure you that we are taking sensible precautions to minimize the impact on our clients, staff, and operations while ensuring it’s business as usual.