As we all know, COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus has been quickly spreading and worldwide efforts have now concentrated on flattening the curve! To help support these efforts, Kasten is asking all employees in impacted areas to work from home, stopping all travel, and is closing down offices for the near term.
There are a number of excellent resources out there that cover how to plan and prepare for these extremely unusual circumstances we all find ourselves in. Instead of covering those, I want to cover how this impacts our customers today and, in the hope that it might be useful to others too, also cover how we have prepared for the ensuing weeks and months to minimize any internal or external disruption.
I. Impact on Customers
As a quick summary, there should be minimal to zero impact to our customers today given how we work (more below).
As always, customers can reach out to us via Slack (by far our customer-preferred approach even in normal times), Zoom, email, phone, Twitter and text. We are not shutting work down and you can expect no change in our customer success obsession!
For new customers thinking about evaluating our data management platform for managing their Kubernetes applications, there should again be zero impact because of our sharp focus on ease-of-use. Since the day the company was incorporated, we have focused on removing Kubernetes complexity away from our end users and taking the work on ourselves to simplify data protection workflows.
This has resulted in a product that can install in 10 minutes or less and requires no sales or sales engineering visits to your office. With easy-to-follow docs and a free starter edition (no sign-up required either!), you should be ready to go. We are always here to help if you have any questions or run into any setup issues. Ask us for an invite to our support slack.
II. Getting Ready at Kasten
Since we founded the company, we have always built out our internal infrastructure with a zero-trust philosophy in mind. We, therefore, have no “internal network” and the systems our teams use are chained together via SSO. This also means that we had no VPN licenses to think about or extra bandwidth to provision as a greater fraction of the team starts working from home.
We have also enforced good communication hygiene within the company. Communication is encouraged via Slack (also keeps our open-office area really quiet), JIRA, or Confluence. This has not just helped people that might be working from home but also enabled a scalable and clear communication channel between folks in our offices in California and Utah. While we have not been fully distributed, we expect the fact that we have two geographically distant locations to help us move over to being fully distributed for the near term.
This is not to say that we won’t have challenges. The lack of in-person camaraderie, gathering around the coffee machine (yup, coffee!), being able to grab lunch and talk about all-things-technical, and more will be sorely missed. Let’s see how best we can substitute for some of those efforts!
Finally, even if the current situation continues for longer than a few months and it looks like the community, as a whole, is entering uncharted waters, this is something we are confident we can get through together. If you have any questions or believe we can help in any way, please feel free to reach out! We would be happy to help in any way we can!
Stay safe!
- Niraj, CEO and Co-Founder
Niraj Tolia is the General Manager and President of Kasten (acquired by Veeam), that he founded in order to solve the problem of Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery. With a strong technical background in distributed systems, storage, and data management, he has held multiple leadership roles in the past, including Senior Director of Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost group and VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Dr. Tolia received his PhD, MS, and BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
