hSo Statement Regarding the Energy Crisis

Business Continuity:

As an established managed services provider to government and enterprise customers we understand the importance of providing resilient and reliable service. hSo’s Business Continuity plans are continuously reviewed to consider emerging threats and new threats assessed and actions and mitigations undertaken to ensure we can deliver world class service irrespective of external events. There has been much in the press recently regarding the possible impacts from the energy crisis and the potential that increased disruption that may result. The current Government worst case blackout plans are based on 3 hour rolling outage periods.

hSo’s 24/7 Network Operations Centre responds to faults and change requests for our customers’ services and for our own core infrastructure. All hSo’s services are geo-resilient and diversely routed providing automatic fail over of our services including but not limited to Internet Access, connectivity, voice, security and cloud compute services. Many of our customers also make use of diversely routed connections.

Operations Preparedness

Regarding the current situation, we have been liaising closely with our supply chain and service providers to identify any potential areas of risk and can report that currently there are no specific areas of material concern.

hSo’s core services and operational systems are based in third party datacentres (“DCs”). The UK’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (“CPNI”) has classified data centres as being part of the UK’s Critical National Infra (“CNI”).

We have obtained confirmation from these core DCs regarding power availability and resilience. All critical DCs have dual supply national grid feeds, UPS and generator backups. The backup generators are able to run without external power for over 24 hours with contracted refuelling agreements with refuelling within four hours of placing a fuel resupply order.

The global and national carriers that hSo uses for our core network and connecting customers have also been contacted regarding their business continuity plan for the energy crisis. We have received assurances regarding the continuation of services but they and hSo see the largest risk to be offices and businesses not have service due to local power supply outages.

hSo operates a hybrid working policy and worked fully remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic and therefore have significant experience in working during national emergencies form wherever we can. The working location of hSo Staff themselves is known, as is their power Load Block, meaning we know from Government published rolling blackout plans, which staff may be affected and when. hSo confirms that hybrid working and staff geographic, and hence Load block diversity, mean we will have sufficient resources to provide service to our customers through this crisis.

However, we are not complacent and will continue to actively monitor events and will provide additional guidance if this situation changes.

To see real-time hSo network status please visit https://hsostatus.io/

This statement is available to download in PDF format here.