Managing director Damon Robertson explains how his determination to give something back to the NHS and key workers was sparked by a brewery TV interview

We have all seen the updates many companies are sending out to their customers about how they are following government guidelines etc…it is all well and good, but they are getting pretty repetitive, and I’m sure most customers have long since switched off. If you have read one you have read them all.

At the end of the day, we can all do little else BUT follow government guidelines. And try to be as kind and supportive to one another as is humanly possible in these hideous times.

We are battling through our own lockdown here at COOLSPIRiT, which has seen contracts put on ice, and new business prospects temporarily out of reach; but unlike a lot of the customer-facing organisations such as restaurants, hotels and bars, we are still able to get on with work - albeit on a more limited basis - and keep our existing customers happy and fulfilled.

All our staff are safely working from home, and those of us that do go into the office are definitely adhering to social distancing guidelines. See more in a Q&A with Damon, here.

So many companies and individuals out there are doing a fantastic job at the moment in difficult circumstances, and we also wanted to give something back to those frontline heroes. 

We were inspired by a TV interview with BrewDog Brewery, which switched almost immediately from beer production to making much sought after hand sanitiser for those most in need on the frontline, after 90 per cent of its business stopped overnight when the lockdown was announced.

But we are a storage and data protection solution provider, so making hand sanitiser was a little out of our reach. We couldn’t compete with that.

However, we had our own BrewDog lightbulb moment shortly after that.

Chesterfield Hospital was talking to us about an emergency Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) project, but they were still using a lot of resource worrying about data protection and backup. So we offered to take it off their hands and run it as a managed service for the next three to four months, allowing them to focus on the new project or do something else vitally important such as looking at clinical data.

We implemented it the next day, completely free of charge, because we had the bandwidth among our engineers to take it on. We then received a call from Yorkshire Ambulance Service who also were very grateful to take advantage of this new free service for the next few months. 

As that was working so well, we contacted a few local government agencies and asked if we could help them over the same time frame in the same way – managing their data protection and data management for them at no charge.  We are now working with a few courts, hopefully helping innocent people who might have been stuck in prison, get through the system quicker by allowing the courts to focus on their core function.

It is a good feeling being able to give something back. While we might not be making PPE or sanitiser liquid, we are taking some of the pressure off those hard-working frontline teams and allowing them to focus on more pressing issues.

We still do have some very limited bandwidth left, so if there are frontline organisations out there that desperately need a helping hand with data management over the coming couple of months, please do get in touch with our team.