Page 8 - Danir_Arsbok_2022_ENG

6

A careful plan,
meticulous preparation
and exceptional drive.

In the dawn hours of 24 February 2022, the unimaginable happens.
Russia invades its neighbouring country Ukraine, the homeland of
Sigma Software and the majority of its 1,900 employees. This is the start
of a period of terrible suffering and triggers the largest wave of refugees
in Europe since World War II. What follows is a tragedy and a sadness for
the civilised world. The outside world wasted no time in condemning Rus-
sia’s invasion and war of aggression. It is a war that violates all interna-
tional law. But even if the rest of the world had believed such an invasion
to be unthinkable, the Ukrainians had long sensed and suspected that it
could happen. After all, the conflict had already been going on for a while
and grew when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Yet in
February, it erupted into all-out war.

“It was perhaps not entirely unexpected that the ongoing conflict
would escalate, but almost no one expected the scale to be so massive.
Most analyses and people around here assumed that it would escalate
in the eastern regions (Donbass). It was hard to believe that a full-scale
war was coming,” says Oleksiy Syrotyuk of Sigma Software in Kyiv of the
Russian invasion.

The Ukrainians and employees at Sigma Software were surprised by
the scale of the attack, but not by the response that followed. They were
well-prepared to act. Sigma first started working on a Business Continu-
ity Plan (BCP) all the way back in 2011. Their plan covered everything
from signing contracts with transport companies for evacuation, pro-
curing medical supplies, and equipping offices with generators to ensure
electricity supply. This BCP has since been refined, and in 2014 it entered
a more “real-life scenario” mode. The internal support for the plan was
huge. It was impossible to predict enough details to be able to make a
step-by-step guide, but the level of detail was sufficient to be able to act,
learn, improve and make the plan work.

When the invasion became a reality, Sigma Software had a meticulous,
detailed and well-established plan. A plan they had been practising for
years. The implementation went exceptionally well.