OVHcloud urge everyone to follow the recommendations issued by public organisations, as well as both national and international authorities. Simple acts of prevention, such as following personal hygiene precautions, are an effective way of protecting both yourself and others from infection. Everyone should show solidarity and remain vigilant — together, we will work to find solutions for confronting this unprecedented global crisis.

Guaranteeing health and safety for all employees – an OVHcloud priority

As soon as the WHO classified COVID-19 as an epidemic, the company began reinforcing prevention measures. It suspended business travel, and raised awareness of personal hygiene and safety precautions in their sites.

To protect everyone, OVHcloud took the decision to make everyone work from home (excluding datacentre and factory employees), across all of OVHcloud’s sites worldwide. All of the sites will be closed this week, apart from the production site (which it has changed the shifts for, to keep employee interaction to a strict minimum) and datacentres. It is aware that by protecting employees, it is doing it's part to prevent the virus from spreading on a larger scale.

Ensuring service continuity for customers

The teams are making every effort to support you under the best conditions. As a consequence, it is deploying business continuity plans. The priority is to ensure a high-quality operational service, which is essential for all of their customers’ activity - both for business, and also on a more strategic, national scale. The company intends to apply this worldwide, wherever it has a presence. The customer support team are also working remotely from home, and will be available to answer support requests as usual. This system - which has already been in effect for two weeks in Italy - has now been deployed across all countries with no impact on service quality. It is also protecting employees in datacentres, with prevention measures reinforced on-site. Today, all datacentre and server maintenance operations can be carried out as usual. The infrastructure is able to absorb 20Tbps bandwidth, and for this reason, it does not believe that this crisis will impact the quality of service it is offering. OVHcloud is working in close contact with suppliers, and it does not expect to experience any provisioning issues for future deliveries required for producing own servers. “OVHcloud’s teams are working exceptionally,” explains Michel Paulin.

Taking part in the effort: open-solidarity

To combat this healthcare crisis, many companies are working in solidarity with one another, to offer remote working, collaboration and healthcare hosting solutions. Given the gravity of the situation and the self-isolation required in many countries, we can expect these solutions to be in very high demand. Concepts like helping one another and working together as a community are fundamental values of OVHcloud, and they are put into action by the founder - Octave Klaba - and CEO Michel Paulin. As a result, OVHcloud has decided to do everything it can to offer free infrastructures without any commitment period for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. The aim of this is to help and support traffic spikes for websites that fall within these business sectors. Websites and infrastructures receiving free service will also benefit from the same level of maintenance and support.

Michel Paulin, CEO OVHcloud said: "#Open_solidarity. This initiative is a collective, open act of digital solidarity — the aim of which is to make reliable tech solutions more widely available by offering them for free on OVHcloud infrastructures. To do this, OVHcloud is delivering web-cloud, bare metal, private cloud and public cloud solutions free of charge for the entire duration of the crisis — and this is for software publishers, start-ups and public service providers. This way, they can also offer free remote working, communication, healthcare and other solutions to SMEs and individuals."

Octave Klaba, Founder OVHcloud commented: "OVHcloud is in a strategic sector. Today, the cloud has become an essential infrastructure that makes the world go round — just like air, water, and electricity. In light of this unprecedented healthcare crisis, our daily lives and freedoms have been heavily impacted. Over the next few months, digital services will be in high demand, because they offer a number of solutions for facing the self-isolation required in this situation. Collectively, everyone needs to multiply initiatives for making all of these solutions visible and accessible to everyone. Open solidarity is the guarantee that a free infrastructure can be scaled up enough to meet demand. It is an initiative for solidarity, the sole aim of which is to offer and share OVHcloud expertise with our community."