Katalyst Data Management Update on Essential Business Operations Under “Stay Home” Order

As an Essential Service, Katalyst Data Management Remains Open

To Our Valued Customers,

Katalyst continues to make the health and safety of our employees our top priority. We have established a global task force that is closely monitoring the situation in all the communities where we operate. The task force is communicating with all our 350 global employees on a daily basis, ensuring they have all the necessary information they need to stay safe. Our key message to our employees is to remain diligent and responsible. We as individuals can make a difference in fighting COVID-19. We continue to emphasize on a daily basis the importance of washing your hands, practicing social distancing, staying home if you are ill, avoiding crowds, and not touching your face. Our employees continue to perform extremely well under such difficult circumstances.

Several governments around the world are instituting some variation of “Shelter-in-Place” or “Stay Home” orders. Each jurisdiction is following different guidelines and providing different expectations and exceptions to the order. The Katalyst COVID-19 task force is reviewing each order as it is issued in the locations where we operate. We are taking appropriate actions based on guidelines provided by each local government.

In Texas, the local Harris Country government has issued a “Stay Home, Work Safe” order. The local order limits work to only essential businesses as outlined by the CISA guidelines. The order took effect at midnight on March 24, 2020.

As outlined in the CISA Guidance on Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers 1-20-508c, Katalyst is considered an essential business. Katalyst falls under the COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY section of the document.

Under these guidelines, Katalyst is an essential business and our offices remain open. Katalyst team members have a number of responsibilities that fall under these guidelines. We have data center operators, system administrators, IT managers, data transfer solutions engineers, software and hardware engineers, and database administrators. These are all people that support our cloud and web-based services that provide critical data and information to our energy customers.

Internally, Katalyst has already issued a work-from-home order for all those employees whose job requirements allow them to do so. The work-from-home order allows almost 75% of our employees to perform their job function from outside the office, and we have the network capacity to support this.

We have also identified our business critical employees that will remain on-site delivering the critical services to our customers as outlined in the CISA guidance. The essential job roles include logistics technicians, data transfer personnel, system administrators, hardware engineers and database administrators. These job roles are required to be on-site and available to maintain our current level of services to our customers.

To reduce the risk of exposure to COVID-19 for those business critical employees, we are practicing social distancing by spreading our people across multiple shifts. This will limit the number of people required to be on-site at any one time. We are also taking additional precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, such as cleaning work surfaces multiple times a day and providing hand sanitizing stations throughout the facilities.

We greatly appreciate all of our wonderful employees and our valued customers. We stand with all of you during these unprecedented times. As always, we will continue to do our part to reduce the impact of COVID-19. This is truly a global partnership and one that Katalyst is committed to supporting with everything we have. Thank you for all your support and we will continue to provide updates as warranted.

Sincerely,

Steve Darnell, President and CEO
Katalyst Data Management