Ex Libris’ Response to COVID-19

Updated December 21, 2021

We continue to monitor the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and its global impact. Ex Libris is committed to providing awareness and transparency to our customers, employees, and partners regarding our status and the actions that we are taking. Our business continues to be fully operational, with no disruption to our services and systems. 

Ex Libris’ Business Continuity Management (BCM) team has activated our well-established business continuity program to mitigate potential disruptions to our business. The Business Continuity Plan includes a focus on:

• The health and safety of our customers and employees
• The continuity of our services
• Supporting our customers and their users
• Compliance with governmental regulations and public health guidance

Supporting our employees’ health and safety

• All business travel has been suspended until further notice to protect the health and safety of our employees and our customers. We are holding virtual meetings rather than traveling in order to stay connected with customers, colleagues and partners.
• We have implemented a company-wide work from home policy and have restricted access to our offices. We are closely monitoring guidelines from the government and health officials in the local communities where our employees and customers live and work. Taking into consideration guidance from local public health directives, global best practices, and feedback from employees and leaders within the region, we are customizing local plans for each site.
• While Ex Libris employees are physically distancing, we remain socially supportive and have created virtual team events, recurring video hangouts, and chat channels to check-in and stay connected.
• We have launched an employee engagement program to keep our global staff informed and supported throughout the crisis, as well as facilitating the roll-out of continuity measures across the business. The engagement program includes online panels, webinars and sessions designed to increase collaboration and teamwork and to keep employees engaged and connected.
• To emphasize the importance of a comfortable and productive work-from-home environment, and as part of our ongoing support of employees who are working remotely during this challenging period, Ex Libris has launched an employee program to reimburse payment for home office equipment.
• We are carefully reviewing our event calendar, as well as our presence at industry events in the coming months. We’ve put new guidelines in place, and we are moving events to virtual format, postponing or canceling events, as necessary. These are often difficult decisions but maintaining our commitment to the health and well-being of our customers and employees remains our top priority.
• We’re abiding by all national and local rules and restrictions and closely monitoring information and guidelines provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and local authorities.

Supporting our business continuity

• As an organization that is already ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Planning) certified, we are managing a robust business continuity program that ensures that our services will continue uninterrupted.
• We recently successfully passed the audit for ISO 22301 conducted by an external security auditor. The latest certificate can be found here.
• We have implemented daily Business Continuity Team meetings to ensure that updates and changes are communicated to customers, partners, and employees.
• Ex Libris has a robust program in place to enable our workforce to work remotely:
  • Our connectivity and workforce productivity tools have been thoroughly tested to ensure that employees have secure and continuous access to our systems, data, and team members.
  • All Ex Libris employees are connected remotely to our business systems as well as maintain internal and external communications.
  • The Ex Libris 24x7 Hub (Network Operation Center / Security Operation Center) continues to operate 24x7 to support our customers and provides 24x7 monitoring for all logical network access to Ex Libris cloud services.
  • Ex Libris continues with its program of employee training to improve efficiency while ensuring optimal use of tools for customer and operational support.
• The BCM team continues to meet and plan for different scenarios, such as a smooth return to the physical office with maintenance of social distancing and enhanced sterilization procedures.
• As a global company, our critical business functions, including technical support and cloud operations, are operating from several regions around the world. We also have a cloud infrastructure that provides redundancy across geographies and across a multi-vendor network. This global model ensures our ability to continue to deliver world-class customer support and service levels for our customers.
• We have geographically dispersed data centers with redundancies in each region.  If you’d like to know more of our approach to reliability in the cloud, please see https://trust.exlibrisgroup.com/availability/
• We have established an updated communications policy with our key vendors and are in touch with them regularly.
• We continue to be in touch with our partners and suppliers and continuously monitor our vendors’ COVID-19 statements to ensure that our joint solutions and services run smoothly for the benefit of our customers.
• We continue to ensure that both our internal and external systems (such as our data centers) have the ability to continue providing services without interruption.
• The vast majority of our professional services, especially implementation services, are handled remotely without the need to travel to customer sites. Due to the suspension of travel, customer engagements originally planned to take place onsite will now be delivered remotely.
• Our R&D capabilities are not impacted by the crisis since they can be performed remotely. Our products and engineering teams continue to prioritize our roadmap and we remain on track with all our product releases.
• The Ex Libris Cloud Services staff includes 24x7 on-call expert infrastructure engineers such as security, network, databases, storage, and system experts as well as dedicated on-call application developers who are notified by the operating center in the event of a service interruption and can provide service remotely.
• You can find more information on how Ex Libris’ cloud architecture and services are designed to ensure high availability and business continuity in our Cloud Services Business Continuity Plan (BCP) policy. Also, you can always check the system status page for the latest information on the availability of all Ex Libris cloud services - https://status.exlibrisgroup.com . 

Supporting our customers and end users

• Ex Libris is committed to supporting our customers (cloud and on-premises) throughout the course of this pandemic and to provide continuity of service at all times.
• We have launched a series of new initiatives to support our customers and the wider community. These initiatives promote library resource sharing, student engagement, online learning, and COVID-19-focused research news and funding. Information regarding our new initiatives is available here, and will continue to be updated regularly. As our customers return to the “new normal,” we continue to develop initiatives and content to support them.
• We have created resources to continue to help our customers with their transition to remote learning/online classes and we have offered a series of live and recorded webinars to discuss best practices.
• We have been conducting webinar sessions on best practices for each Ex Libris solution during this situation. All webinars were recorded and are available together with documentation, presentations including tips and free resources, and a Q&A for each product, at this link: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Cross_Product/Best_Practices_for_the_Ex_Libris_Community_During_COVID-19
• We will continue to create programs aimed at bridging gaps for our customers and users as they navigate the current unprecedented challenges.
• We have increased channels of internal communication, and as always, prioritize communication with you, our customers. We will continue to be responsive, work hard to provide excellent service, and stay connected to you during this challenging time.

Ex Libris continues to closely monitor this dynamic situation and is prepared to make real-time decisions to implement other measures that support our employees and customers. We will continue to provide updates to our customers as we learn more. We appreciate your patience throughout these challenging times and thank you for your ongoing support.  

If there is anything that we can do to support you and your institution, or if you have questions or concerns, please contact your account team or email us at Exlibris-support@proquest.com .

As the situation continues to evolve, we will post updates to our Trust Center https://trust.exlibrisgroup.com and send email notifications.

We are confident in our ability to limit the impact of COVID-19 to our services because of these preparations. We wish you all good health as we navigate this difficult situation.

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