As we all know, the battle against COVID 19 has been extremely tough. Throughout this hard time, it has been inspiring to see our key workers helping the nation to carry on.
We, like everyone here in the UK, have stood at our doors clapping for our NHS every Thursday to show our upmost appreciation for all of the hard work that they have done during this unprecedented time. We would now like to take the opportunity to thank our engineering teams that have continued to support our clients, donning masks, and heading onsite to ensure that critical datacentres have kept up and running.
Although we can carry out some work remotely, if there is a disk error, or a PSU starts to fail, engineers must drive to sites across the country, to ensure the issue is resolved. One recent call out was for a major water utility provider that has a very unusual set of older data centre technologies. There are only a handful of individuals in the UK who could be considered as subject matter experts for these systems and thankfully, we have two such people in our team.
We also support over a dozen NHS Trusts across the country and in March, we took the decision to priotise key sectors such as healthcare and national infrastructure during this global pandemic. Our engineers have put in extra shifts, but thankfully, many of our clients have preventative maintenance strategies and our support teams have met all our SLA’s across every client for March and April.
We have also wanted to show our appreciation further to the NHS by offering discounts for services, and no charges for an increase in SLA’s to help support them during this time. With lock-down restrictions hopefully starting to ease, it is important that IT staff returning to their respective desks and data centres do not overlook the importance of ongoing maintenance regimes.
However, before pilling into the fray, one of our most experienced engineering team leads says that,” IT staff should spend a bit of time prioritising what’s urgent and what items can be carried out quickly with little risk of downtime.” We are here to help with this ‘to do list’, our engineers can help you every step of the way It is also worth noting that a number of widely deployed networking and storage products have had End-of-Support / End-of-Life notices issued during the current health crisis and having a quick review of where all the support contracts stand is also a worthwhile task. Our next blog will have a look at some of these notices and their impact, but from everybody at Data-Shield, please stay safe, stay well and we look forward to seeing you all, in person, at some point very soon.
Please contact us on 01244 314144 for any more information during this period.
Best wishes from all at Data-Shield.
