Root Causes 75: Sectigo's COVID-19 Readiness

Hosted by

Tim Callan

Chief Compliance Officer

Jason Soroko

Fellow

Original broadcast date

March 18, 2020

As measures move into place throughout society to flatten the curve of COVID-19's spread, it is important to understand the potential effects of lock downs, school closures, and work-from-home mandates on the critical systems that keep our digital world running. Sectigo has conducted an internal audit of its business continuity and disaster recovery plans in light of the specifics of the ongoing pandemic, and we remain confident in our ongoing operation without material disruption through the present crisis. In this episode our hosts go over the results of Sectigo's COVID-19 readiness audit and what customers can expect in the months to come.

Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for flow and brevity.

Tim CallanHow are you doing today, Jason?

Jason SorokoI am doing well, Tim, but there’s stuff going on in the world today I think we need to talk about.

Tim CallanThere’s stuff going on in the world. We are sheltering in place. I am here at my home with my kids who are not in daycare and it’s just a loud house because that’s what we are all living with right now and because, of course, we are going to talk today about COVID-19 and, I think we want to talk about Sectigo and our preparedness for this outbreak and how Sectigo will operate through the outbreak.

Jason SorokoWe are still running.

Tim CallanWe are still running. So, you know, it’s a best practice to have disaster planning and contingency planning and business continuity planning in place and so all those plans have been in place at Sectigo since the early days of the company and we are glad for that. However, we did want to go and sort of assess, you know, when you are doing these plans in the abstract it’s different than when there’s a real genuine threat to your operations where you can go back and look at the specifics of that threat and verify that your operations are going to be resilient against it. So, last week we went through a preparedness exercise to compare our business continuity plans against what really happened or what really appears to be happening and we were quite satisfied with the results. So, let me share a couple facts.

So, first, the high level is that we are confident that Sectigo’s operations are not going to be compromised in any material way because of this outbreak and the actions that are taking place as a result but let’s get into a few specifics.

First, we do have a globally distributed business and we are operating across four different countries with employees operating centers in all of those and we are able to run the entire operation from any of single one of those four national locations. So, if for some reason we were completely unable to use our offices in, let’s say the UK, we would still have three other offices to fall back on. So that’s point number 1.

We do, as I said, have business continuity and disaster recovery fully in place, plans fully in place and we are enabled for most to all of our employees to work remotely in the event that that’s what needs to happen. So, even if there is a true lockdown in one of our epicenter locations like the New Jersey area or the Ottawa area, we are able to send those employees home and those employees’ productivity can continue without any worries or any pause.

So, those are the main things that we were working on and we did think it was important to evaluate this for our own operations and we do feel like there is not presently any jeopardy to any of Sectigo’s operations.

Jason SorokoYeah, Tim, and I can tell you that myself, my colleagues, and I happen to know a lot of the teams, we are very, very successfully working remotely right now like a lot of people should. A lot of conferences we were supposed to go to have been cancelled, etc., so we are gonna be staying put and getting our jobs done.

Tim CallanYeah. So, this is a very short podcast. I don’t know that there is a lot more we want to add to this, but we have been trying to get the word out on that. We have gotten questions from our customers about how this will affect us and our operations. Obviously, our customers need to be able to issue and renew and revoke and manage certificates through all of this and again, we are fully confident that there will not be anything to interfere with any of that activity. So, be aware of that and that’s probably all we have to say today.

Jason SorokoStay safe out there, folks.

Tim CallanStay safe. Thank you, Jay

Jason SorokoTake care, Tim.

Tim CallanThis has been Root Causes.

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