The escalating threat of COVID-19 is something we are taking very seriously. As such, we have made a number of recent policy changes to ensure the ongoing safety of our employees and customers, as well as to ensure ongoing product and service continuity. Being able to respond quickly to rapidly-evolving situations like this epidemic while maintaining uninterrupted service is part of Amplience’s Business Continuity program and a big part of our commitment to our customers.
To that end we have stopped business related international and domestic business travel unless absolutely essential, and only to unrestricted destinations. In addition, as of Tuesday 17th March, we have introduced a mandatory working-from-home (WFH) policy.
If our employees show any signs of symptoms related to COVID-19, have travelled to a restricted destination, or have been in close physical contact with someone who has travelled to a restricted destination and is showing symptoms, we require them to self-isolate for 14 days.
We have contingency plans in place to re-allocate engineering resource to cover for incapacitated employees.
We have also shared best practice health advice and guidance in line with UK NHS and UK Government recommendations (and if based outside of the UK, with the local, official advice), with all employees.
Please note: Amplience systems are configured to enable support and operations employees to work from home, without constraint. Business continuity planning has taken place, and we are confident that in the event of widespread illness due to COVID-19, we will be able to provide full customer service and operational support.
In addition, our critical suppliers are reviewed annually to ensure that their service continuity plans adequately safeguard the services utilised by Amplience at all times and are aligned with our contracted obligations and service levels.
Amplience Disaster Recovery and Resilience Planning
Amplience is a very capable business when it comes to resilience and disaster recovery. The Amplience platform is based on the scalable public cloud infrastructure supplied by Amazon AWS. The Amplience platform is a SAAS solution and is hosted on the AWS infrastructure and provides cross available zone redundancy (services distributed across three data centres) and disaster recovery in an alternate AWS region.
We use a multi-tier load balanced caching mechanism to deliver all published media. The platform servers are specified for optimum performance and will scale dynamically according to load. Storage is implicitly provided through S3 with content cached and delivered via our CDN infrastructure. We load balance our DNS resolution through two leading enterprise global DNS providers.
Amplience’s service is contractually governed by our SLA to our customers. In order to sustain 99.99% on object delivery we utilise automation to automatically remove and re-route traffic in the event of a failure. The multiple layers of CDN’s and horizontal scaling of multiple infrastructure providers provides us with higher resilience. The entire Amplience infrastructure is monitored closely..
Amplience has been designed with disaster recovery in mind, across all services. Exercising these is part of our business as usual processes. For example, when we release updates to our systems, we use automation to clone the production system and restore data backups onto the new infrastructure to perform production realistic testing (staging).
Backups are performed based upon preconfigured schedules as well as manual snapshotting for change management purposes. Database backups are performed on a daily basis with transactional log backups (where appropriate to the database technology) being taken and replicated every 15 minutes to Amazon S3. A number of technologies are used to ensure the data is backed up and verified on an ongoing basis.
Redundancy is a key area that has been built into the Amplience service, this allows for the service to continue to operate with minimal overall impact. Amplience services are configured for auto scaling upon the latency metric, therefore if a data centre is lost, services will automatically start to ramp up to continue serving the increased request requirements.
For more information on Amplience system status across all critical services, please visit status.amplience.com
