As the COVID19 Coronavirus continues to spread globally and the situation changes by the day, we want to update all our clients and stakeholders about the measures we have put in place to address BH Consulting’s employee and business risks. Our aim is to ensure the health and safety of our staff and clients, and to continue delivering service to our clients. Operating remotely or on site is a normal part of our operations, and as such we are expecting little change to our service level or operational response.

We take the health and wellbeing of all our staff very seriously and our senior management team have been keeping a close track of developments relating to COVID19. As a company certified to the ISO 27001:2013 Information Security standard, we also have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place that we have recently put into action.

Business continuity planning for COVID19

The first part of our BCP implementation was to ensure all our staff were briefed on how best our organisation could respond to the crisis and to our customers. As a company, our employees already practice three ways of working – on site with clients, on site in the office, or from home. All employees have now tested that the collaborative tools that we use from home, and broadband, mobile phone hotspots etc all work effectively.

All BH Consulting staff are assigned with laptops and mobile phones. Our primary systems are based in the cloud, so our staff can work remotely in the event that we need to close our offices. Staff can access these systems via their home broadband or via their company assigned mobile phones which have unlimited data access plans.

If a member of staff needs to self-isolate, or a member of their family requires assistance, they are able to work remotely. If a member of staff becomes sick, our contingency is to have another member of staff take over their work. To facilitate this, all staff manage their projects through our cloud based project and task management platform.

Staff contingency planning

In addition, we are implementing daily updates on projects which will be managed and coordinated by our Operations Manager. this way, we have visibility on statuses across all projects with key clients

Should key personnel working on a particular client account become ill, we will inform that client in as timely a manner as possible. We will also provide contact details of the replacement consultant who will be looking after this account until the primary consultant recovers.

Finally, as a cybersecurity company, we also advise people to be on the lookout for malware campaigns exploiting the Coronavirus situation. This is a classic tactic for scammers and cybercriminals, and it works by preying on people’s natural curiosity about major global events in the news. Researchers at Malwarebytes discovered several examples of phishing emails and infected Word documents that pretend to contain updates, information about preventing the spread of the virus, and even pages supposedly for donating money to help research into the virus.

Instead, we recommend you visit only trusted news sources for health and safety information about Coronavirus, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) website and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control page. Ireland’s Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection has published information for employers and employers which you can find at this page. Ongoing updates from the Department of Health are available here.