Business Continuity Plan

The Black Box Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is designed to support business continuance and recovery in the event of a significant business disruption such as a global or local emergency, natural disaster, or pandemic. Black Box is committed to planning and preparing for these situations in order to remain operational and continue to serve our valuable clients around the world.

This plan is designed to support Black Box recovery from disruptions of varying lengths and scope. Since the timing and impact of disasters and disruptions are unpredictable, flexibility is an important element of the plan. This flexibility will help the Company react and respond to specific events as they occur. Once the plan is activated, it is designed to accomplish four things:

1. Safeguard our team members’ lives and firm property
2. Assess the financial and operational impact of the disruption
3. Strive to quickly recover and maintain required operations during a disruption
4. Strive to sustain and ultimately resume normal operations

The Black Box BCP includes the following components:

Black Box has operations in more than 24 countries. Therefore, the BCP can be activated locally, nationally, or globally, depending on the specific circumstances related to the disruption.

The BCP is managed and maintained by a cross-functional team of subject matter experts, including representation from Human Resources, Facilities, IT, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Customer Experience, and Communications. The executive team is fully aware and engaged with the plan in order to support continuance and recovery during a disruption. The BCP is systematically reviewed annually to help ensure it stays current and up-to-date.

The Black Box continuity of operations strategy to respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic is a six-pronged approach. Project and team leads in the field play a vital role in the execution of this strategy. They need to make key decisions regarding continuously educating and reminding field technicians of their due-diligence to safeguard themselves, team members, and customers from the COVID-19 threat. They also need to anticipate and prioritize which customers are likely to be impacted first and have a critical need to function during a pandemic (e.g. Healthcare institutes, hospitals, etc. who may have a critical dependency to receive field support at the time of physical site lockdowns). The continuance of an operations strategy to deal with the COVID-19 situation starts from supporting the minimum critical services for key customers, and expanding to normal / desired operations (as required and/or as much as possible) that can be remotely supported and conducted for the customer. It is also important for project / team leads to proactively prioritize key skills of the field resources during these times so that if the customer wants the minimum and most critical services to be supported remotely initially, then the project / team leads can make the decision quickly regarding who those resources are, and what kind of services can be supported remotely by them. Due to the scope and scale of COVID-19, each location may have its own specific challenges, but the five-step strategy below should be used as a guideline to deal with the negative impacts of the COVID-19 virus, including dealing with customer site lockdowns, unavailability of field manpower, etc.

1. Ensure People/ Human Safety – At All times. Ensure all resources (field techs, employees, temps, contractors etc.) follow the official guidelines available to them through legitimate local and global healthcare sources to deal with the COVID-19 virus.
2. Be Connected to the Black Box Network. Ensure all field resources with Black Box laptops test their ability to connect to the Black Box network remotely. When working remotely, all field technicians (i.e. working at the field or from home during a customer site lockdown) must have the ability to connect to the network remotely to support their day-to-day internal Black Box activities, be updated with latest technology and tools, which in turn helps support their customers’ work.
3. Establish a Network of Backup Suppliers & Vendors for Supporting Required Services. Key/primary suppliers that support a business function must be contacted for their BCP plan. Black Box has, and will continue, to identify secondary level backup suppliers in case a primary supplier is unavailable for continuity of vendor/supplier support operations.
4. Proactively Know the Customer’s Support Expectations for Remote Work. The need of field technicians to connect to the customer’s network remotely (due to the physical site being locked down) and/or to continue to support customers will be dictated by the customers themselves. The customer needs to identify Black Box services as critical services needed through the customer’s own BCP process. Project/team leads must proactively reach out to their customers to evaluate what services and tasks are expected to be supported and what can be supported remotely. If the customer does expect Black Box field technicians to support them remotely, then two use case scenarios arise:
   • If a Black Box technician has a need to connect to a customer’s network, and has a customer-owned laptop, the following applies: customer-owned laptops should already be enabled for the field technician to support required functions through their laptop remotely. If not, please reach out to your customer to confirm.
   • If the field technician has an Black Box-owned laptop only, specific instructions to connect to the customer’s network may need to be followed. e.g. download customer VPN, install specific software, etc. Please reach out to your customer to confirm instructions.
5. Constant Communication and Feedback. The project/team leads in the field, through their country managers, will continuously provide feedback on the status, challenges, and decisions with the BCP executive team each week. Regular meetings will be held to monitor the progress of the continuity of critical operations by Black Box management.
6. Customer / Vendors & Suppliers Responsibility
   Likewise, Black Box expects customers, vendors, and suppliers to manage their own business continuity plans.
   • Customers – Customers need to evaluate their BCP and communicate to Black Box project leads their expectations for support in the case of a site lockdown.
   • Vendors / Suppliers – 3rd party vendors and suppliers that support Black Box business services need to have backup suppliers in case they are unable to support normal business services for the organization. They also need to create a BCP plan and indicate how they intend to support service delivery.

If you need more information about the Black Box Business Continuity Plan, please reach out to your account manager or email customersvp@BlackBox.com .