Being available in business at unusual times and providing non-stop support to customers have been Essen Vision’s success mantra. Nityanand Shetty, Founder and CEO, Essen Vision shares why the company has not seen a single escalation of any support delay or challenges in the last 15 days by any of its customers
As a security solution provider, how do you assess the current scenario and the lessons learned? What’s your preparedness to handle such unprecedented situation?
As a cyber security solutions provider, our induction programmes ensure that our engineers have a DNA that inculcates a sense of preparedness for any crisis management and to deliver results on 24×7 basis. We have ensured each of our Level 1 and Level 2 engineers is well equipped with laptops and internet dongles, enabling them to work from home at any point of time. As a practice, every engineer has network availability. Remote access service has been a requirement in our field of work, it is not a new challenge for us.
Our support helpdesk is facilitated through a cloud-based CRM. The monitoring happens at two levels. The engineer keeps the client support ticket data live and updated to the last call and query. The team leads monitor the calls raised by clients and lend their expert inputs wherever required. Besides, we have an internal average ticket monitoring module which analyses the ticket closure time, based on the severity of the support call. Most importantly, every client has been sent a note about a team escalation matrix, assuring them of our continued services.
How are you safeguarding your customers’ assets / premises in order to ensure continuity of their business operations?
All the account managers are personally in co-ordination with their designated clients. Additionally, the technical leads are writing a personal note of assurance related to continuity of services as well as do’s and don’ts, thus ensuring that there is no hindrance to business operations at the client’s end.
With the sudden rise in cyber attacks in this period, how are you ensuring your customers’ data is safe and helping them mitigate risks?
We have been sending informative newsletters to customers on new threats that have been seen globally with the rise of this pandemic and keeping them updated on any anomalies we have received from our research teams and OEMs. Additional health checks are being conducted on cyber security tools for clients who have subscribed to our Premium Support. We are ensuring that these tools are updated and the right policies are implemented, considering how susceptible the client could be.
During this time of total lockdown, how are you ensuring 24×7 service and support to your customers?
Being ‘available in business at unusual times’ is important for the client. As our business is 90 per cent remote support oriented, we have ensured that our executives have the necessary tools with them to provide support in both business and non-business hours. We haven’t seen a single escalation of any support delay or challenges in the last 15 days by any of our clients.
Highlight some of the challenges being faced in providing service or support to the customers during this period?
Downtime is a big challenge with clients. They do not want to change any policies or upgrade any platforms during this period, as their teams are unavailable at the DCs or DRs. Our teams are well equipped to work around this situation too, and are managing and optimising the solution being offered with the current version. Once the situation returns to normalcy, we will re-visit all our policies and do another health check wherever required.
Soon we will witness business models changing, wherein there will be far more remote workers in any organisation. In such scenario, what are the best cyber security practices that you customers should adopt? How would you, as a security solution provider, complement in such a scenario?
After the onset of this global pandemic, we have realised that BYOD will be here to stay. The rise and adoption of cloud technologies, where the customer moves a large part of core applications to the public cloud or hybrid IT, will be a major part of any company’s security strategy as well as business continuity plan (BCP). Under these circumstances, solutions like MDM, SSL VPNs for internal applications, two-factor authentication solutions, WAF for cloud apps, network access control, data leakage prevention, cloud proxy, encryption, and strong endpoint detection and response solutions will play a key role to protect the rise of the remote access work done in any organisation.
What’s your message to customers, so that they are assured of full support today and in the days to come?
Considering these tremendously challenging and unprecedented times, we want to first state that our thoughts are with every family and individual impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This is a moment for all of us to look at what we can do, not only to protect ourselves, but also to help protect each other.
Organisations around the globe are experiencing a tremendous change, as they take steps to protect their data, teams, and keep their businesses running. We are experiencing this change ourselves and have transitioned into work-from-home mode. We have enabled our teams with the tools, so as to be available for our clients at all times, in the face of any breach or risk.
In order to ensure seamless defence strategies for all our clients, we are helping their IT security teams to adapt to the rapid changes triggered by COVID-19. We would like to assure the clients of our availability 24×7 wherein we will protect their organisation during this crisis.
I would like to quote Winston Churchill here – “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”
