Introduction

We are monitoring the Covid-19 issue closely and have already taken robust action in accordance with official health guidelines. The safety, security and well-being of our staff and clients is of utmost importance. To address concerns regarding Covid-19, we are implementing the following preventative measures, effective immediately:

• Most of Modirum work from home offices already and everyone already has the infrastructure to do so. Only certain specific operations require physical presence in datacenters - see below for details.
• A quarantine period of at least 21 days OR the period recommended by relevant authorities (whichever is longer) will apply to those
  • who have returned from regions or places flagged as high-risk by relevant authorities
  • with any kind of symptoms
  • sharing residence with anyone infected or suspected to be infected
  • who for any other reason should not be exposed to possible infection (hereunder anyone with increased risk of complications from possible infection, particular responsibility for others with similar risks, etc.)
• Modirum has postponed all large internal meetings
• All business travel is cut down to the strictly necessary, observing the above limitations

Datacenter operations and remote management

Our primary datacenter is in the city of Oslo, Norway. A number of precautionary and preventative measures have been imposed by the Norwegian government, including:

• School and kindergarten closures
• Strict home-quarantine requirements
• Shutdowns of various public services

Furthermore our datacenter hosts have enforced restricted access to the colocation facilities. As of Friday 13th March 2020 at 12:00 CET, we no longer have the usual self-governed access to the facilities. We can only obtain temporary access by appointment.

The immediate effect of this is:

• Modirum’s hosting team will now be working mostly from home, causing availability and the hours of operation to be affected
• Only emergency work will be allowed at the datacenter, and only after requesting access and detailing the work that needs to be done. Visits to datacenters will be delayed because of reduced staff numbers and restrictions
• Longer response times to repair hardware failures. This is due to need for new time-consuming administrative arrangements before we can get access to make any physical change. This administrative latency may unfortunately have an impact on our SLA
• In order to ensure a continued stable common environment, we will implement a temporary freeze or postponement for several types of changes to the production environments, e.g.
  • firmware and operating system upgrades
  • system configuration changes that may affect remote management capabilities
  • database schema changes
  • firewall and network infrastructure changes (changes to existing whitelisting may be permissible)

Key management

There will be no loading or generating of ZMKs (transport keys) until normal operations are restored. We estimate this could take from a few weeks up until a few months.

CAVV/AAV/etc. loading using existing transport keys can proceed as usual. However in the cases where keys are being sent physically (as opposed to electronically; see below), there may be significant delays in getting the keys delivered. The availability of the recipient will also be a key factor.

Keys that are already encrypted under a ZMK can safely be exchanged electronically. If absolutely necessary, additional encryption can be applied, preferably using PGP/GnuPG. Note that we do not accept proprietary encryption mechanisms like (win)zip or similar.

Limitations on our ability to support and implement customers

We will do our best to ensure that ongoing implementation projects proceed as planned, subject to the above limitations and to the best of our ability. System security, maintaining redundancy and other important maintenance will take precedence.