1.Business Continuity Plan

• Aspire Systems is an ISO 27001 certified company with a BCM framework implemented across the organization.
• The BCP team, together with Delivery, IT, Travel, Facilities and HR teams, have set up a centralized Steering Committee to collaborate and take critical decisions that have been communicated effectively to the team members.
• The Committee has continuously monitored the situation at every stage, guiding the organization through stages 1, 2 and 3 of the Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
• The BCP comprises an internal call/decision-tree, creation of an email group for better collaboration and the publishing of a travel advisory, screening and hygiene guidelines, transport and evacuation plans, and hardware and software disaster recovery plans.
• This was backed up by a BCP simulation exercise where a couple of teams were evacuated and work from home was initiated.
• With these robust business continuity and business test strategies in place, we are confident of our ability to handle this situation efficiently.

2.IT Support Plan (onsite and offshore)

• An assessment of the number of machines required was made based on the requirements of individual service lines.
• Additional laptops and dongles were mobilized and handed over to the team members working on the various projects. Alternatively, employees’ desktops along with UPS were moved to their homes where necessary.
• Aspire employees have the requisite connections to our IT environments that are secured by multi-factor authentication VPN.
• Team members have access to Skype for Business as well as Teams for their routine calls.
• For the BYOD (laptops/desktops), the IT team has published guidelines on the pre-requisite software with Antivirus recommendations that have been shared with the employees.
• The IT team played a pivotal role in the BCP process, working tirelessly to move our team members’ machines to their locations and ensure the requisite connections had been provided on time.

3.Incident Response

In case of any incident related to COVID-19, the following response plan will take effect:

• Inform health authorities.
• Lockdown and sanitize the affected work bay and neighboring bay as per the government guidelines.
• We had a trial run for the same.
• Follow the customer communication protocol and inform the customer about any possible downtime to servicesh