Frequently Asked Questions

 

1. Does your organization have a pandemic plan in place to respond to and recover from mass absenteeism events, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19)?

 

Couchbase has long embraced remote work, with approximately half of our employees working remotely prior to COVID-19. We do this well. As a result of recent events, we have encouraged all employees to work from home, and to take advantage of our lessons learned, practices, and resources for remote working.

 

 

2. Can you confirm that you have business continuity plans (BCP) in place in the case of office closures?

 

Yes. We want to assure our customers that Couchbase has had a comprehensive business continuity plan since our inception. It is a living, evolving document that is in a state of continuous review and improvement, and it factors in the current COVID-19 outbreak.

 

 

3. Have you any concerns relating to your ability to support your customers in the event that your staff are unable to access their local office or business continuity site for a prolonged period?

 

As a cloud-native company, with geographically dispersed teams across all functions designed to support our global customer base, Couchbase is particularly well-suited and prepared to manage business continuity challenges. Our very structure is designed to ensure that our service remains available to our customers during natural disasters or other unexpected and challenging events, including pandemics. Our business continuity planning also ensures we will have open channels for time-sensitive communications with our customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Couchbase’s remote access worker policy facilitates business continuity when our employees need to work outside of their designated office locations.

 

 

4. Can you please share any amendments to our points of contact for you in the event of a BCP issue impacting your staff’s ability to attend work?

 

Couchbase’s Support team utilizes cloud-based infrastructure and services, available for access worldwide. None of our functions or processes have any requirement for staff in attendance at one of our facilities. Our contact details remain as follows:

 

  • Support ticket creation via support.couchbase.com 

  • Ongoing ticket interaction via the email alias support@couchbase.com

  • Telephone line for urgent issues or escalations: +1-650-417-7500, option #1

 

Each of these facilities are accessible to the geographically distributed world-wide Support organization.

 

 

5. Can you please advise how you will alert us to any changes to your status, should such changes occur? 

 

We will proactively reach out to customers and prospects via their relationship managers, and notifications will be posted on support.couchbase.com for customers who have subscribed to the Announcements forum. 

 

 

6. What measures has your organization taken to mitigate the spread of COVID-19?

 

Couchbase has shifted all employees to home-based work, closed all offices, and postponed all business travel, conferences and client-visits. Our cleaning teams have performed a deep cleaning with disinfectant-grade cleaning products approved by the CDC. When it is deemed safe to reopen offices, our cleaning teams plan to perform a secondary deep cleaning prior to allowing any access by employees or visitors.  

 

 

7. Do you have procedures for communication with your customers, your suppliers, and essential staff if you incur an impact?

 

Yes. We have established dedicated communication channels and relationship owners for each of our customers, partners, and suppliers.

 

 

8. Have you had confirmed impacts to your personnel or sites? What measures and recovery strategies has your organization enacted to respond? 

 

At this time, we have had no confirmed Coronavirus diagnoses among our employees. Cases of possible cross-exposure to sites has been limited to common (co-work) office space or companies in the same building, not Couchbase offices. The entire Couchbase team has been trained on our Emergency Preparedness Plan, and has been instructed to follow the CDC’s guidelines for self-isolation and quarantine if they suspect that they may have been exposed to COVID-19 or suspect symptoms. Should an employee self-report exposure or diagnosis, our COVID-19 Support Team will utilize the Emergency Preparedness Plan to support, determine cross-exposure to our people or sites, and inform local health authorities.

 

 

9. Have steps been taken to address any potential impacts associated with third parties that support your operations from a pandemic perspective? If so, can you provide an overview?

 

As with most modern software companies, Couchbase makes use of many third-party services to conduct its business. In most instances, we use industry-standard tools that are operated as cloud-based services (e.g., GitHub, Jira, Gerrit for development, Office 365, Zoom, Slack, etc.). Such services are shielded from many of the threats posed from a pandemic.

 

 

10. How do you anticipate this outbreak will impact business outcomes?

 

We are doing our very best to mitigate and minimize the impact on business outcomes, but realistically we might see some impact to select timelines, particularly where we are dependent on external partners. While this is not inevitable, due to distraction, supply chain interruptions, etc., it’s not out of the realm of possibility. We’re continuing to assess and evaluate any areas of potential vulnerability from COVID-19 and related external factors.

 

 

11. What expectations have you established with employees, prospects, customers, and partners with respect to air travel, conferences, and face-to-face meetings?

 

We have instructed all employees to work from home, closed all offices to employees and visitors and postponed conferences and visits until further notice. 

 

 

12. What is your work from home policy?

 

Our employees are normally permitted to work from home at the team’s discretion, and nearly half of our employees already do so on a permanent basis. In light of developments and office closures, we have now expanded our work from home posture to all-hands, and extended support, resources and remote work best practices to all.