Well, 2020 has certainly thrown the world into chaos. Here in Pennsylvania, all “non-essential” businesses have been asked to close or work remotely during the Covid19 pandemic. This makes it difficult for our employees to physically access our state of the art lab; however, we are fully able to support our customers’ ongoing needs.

Foresys has always utilized secure VPN access for our employees, but beyond that, our office is nearly fully managed remotely. All of our compute servers are managed as virtual machines using VMWares Vcenter platform, where we can monitor, backup, restore, clone, and upgrade our virtual servers all remotely. Our labs are outfitted with remote KVMs and remote power switches that allow us to power-cycle and access nearly all of our clients’ prototypes for validation. Conveniently, several of our projects involve multi-camera processing, which enables us to “see” our lab from many different angles. Even, our IP phones are remotely managed. We were already making full use of Microsoft Teams for web conferences, so keeping in touch with clients was easy too.

We utilize monitoring software that continuously checks all of our critical systems, ensuring that we are alerted of any issue with our network-connected equipment. Power monitoring software monitors the utility power and will shut-down our systems if an extended outage occurs, and will properly bring up the systems when the power is restored.

The point is that we were already prepared for this unpredictable event. We lost no ground on our ongoing customer projects. While we can’t control how this might affect our industry, we can and do remain fully ready to support all of our clients.

Stay well!