In today’s difficult economic climate, companies are increasingly looking for smarter ways to procure the office space they need – especially now that the added expense and management burden of resilience is added to the mix.
Ernst Wolfaardt, GM: operations at ContinuitySA, says that a growing trend is to take an integrated approach, effectively procuring resilient office space, rather than spending the time and money to make conventional office space resilient.
“Companies are increasingly concerned to make sure that their offices are disaster-proof, and that they can continue trading through power, water and network outages, or any other incident,” Wolfaardt says. “But at the same time, they are unwilling to assume the burden of making all that happen – ensuring resilience is a moving target as risks shift.”
An additional factor is that many companies are looking for better ways to procure and manage their office space in general. Offices are complex to set up and maintain and office renovations can be costly- aside from all the conventional issues relating to office management – furniture, canteens, cable infrastructure and the like – installing and managing sophisticated IT and telephony systems are critical and burdensome obligations.
For several years, ContinuitySA has been offering a turnkey solution to companies who want the peace of mind offered by a resilient office space, and also want a more integrated approach. “This is particularly true of those with fairly demanding requirements; for example, a contact centre with lots of agents needing sophisticated telephony and robust ICT, a bank head office or a security company. For such organisations, the office space has to be highly customised, and it has to be ultra-reliable, no matter what,” Wolfaardt says.
Located as part of its premises in Midrand and Randburg (2 000 m2) as well as Tyger Valley in Cape Town (300 m2), ContinuitySA’s office space is fully furnished and configured to client needs, right down to hardware and top-of-the-range telephony. Common areas, like canteens, meeting areas and boardrooms can be dedicated or shared. It benefits from ContinuitySA’s fully redundant ICT platform hosted at the onsite data centre, including full power and water backups as well as a full range of connectivity options–all the major network providers terminate at ContinuitySA’s facilities.
“Best of all, the facility comes fully managed via our own service desk, so there’s no impact on the client when things need fixing or replacing, or a network or IT system goes down. Think of it as ‘resilient office space as a service’,” Wolfaardt explains. “Best of all, aside from an upfront implementation fee, it’s all a fixed operational expense paid for on a single invoice. As it says on the box, ‘No mess, no fuss’.”
