A further update from Enigma as we’re all responding to the 48 hour notice period of a Level-4 COVID-19 alert:

Enigma continues to be committed to delivering services as-usual in so far as: servicing our existing work, keeping our services up and running and available to customers and fully maintaining our services, network and systems. All of our staff are fully capable of working from our home offices. Our support lines will remain open and available.

Our system and network monitoring has always provided alerts and notifications of both proactive maintenance requirements as well as any critical failures. Our staff will remain diligent in our monitoring of these systems, we are able to respond to almost all alerts remotely without needing a hands-on response. Since we are not operating any face-to-face customer or public facing services the impact of having to work remotely on our core business has been minimal.

While we do deliver services into the Health and Private Sectors, we have not been able to find any specific instances which we believe would mark our work as meeting the Government’s definition of ‘Essential-Services’. If you feel that we have misinterpreted that, if you deliver Essential Services, and if you in turn rely on our services to deliver your Essential Services, then please get in touch with me to let me know.

Backups:

As a final preparatory step, we are implementing temporary changes to our backup-services to enable us to take our backups, off-site without any need for a personal visit to our data-centre. We normally perform full daily backups, duplicate to tape, then shift those tapes off-site to our fireproof tape-safe (within our office).

As a temporary alternative, we are currently commissioning a cloud-based extension of our backup services using Amazon AWS based storage services (located in Sydney – Australia), we will digitally ship the backup content over there. 

Our backups are encrypted before they are written to disk, they remain encrypted throughout their life. When they are at rest within Amazon’s storage they sit on a further encrypted volume. Our retention of those backups within Amazon’s services is currently designed to be 16 days (just over a two week period), after which they will be removed from Amazon’s services.

Our aim is that, by performing these changes, we will hold location independent backups for DR purposes. Our primary backup content will continue to reside within our own networks; this extra step has been taken to improve resilience in the case of any catastrophic loss of the production hosting environment. 

In addition to this, we will be switching from full, daily backups, to one full-weekly backup, followed by incremental backups for the remainder of the week.

 

Our office number (09-9129100), and our DDIs continue to work as normal, as does our support line: 0800 PREDICT – If you have any questions, concerns or queries, please get in touch.

We wish you all the best; for you, your teams, your families and customers.

Chris Wiltshire – General Manager.