Bomb shelters under the office, Starlink on a hardware budget, and relocation for $1,000: how IT companies are preparing for a difficult winter

The office as a point of invincibility — and a bomb shelter to boot

During the four years of war, the office has managed to stop being just a place to work — now it is also a proven way to survive a blackout or shelling. The ZONE3000 locations have undergone this transformation most literally: an underground shelter was equipped in the Lviv representative office, and the company actually built the Kharkiv office inside an old bomb shelter — you can work and hide there, and there are backup sources of electricity and the Internet at both sites.

EPAM has formalized this approach into a separate annual initiative, the Winter BCP Program, which has been in effect since the start of the full-scale invasion. Offices across the country are being put on enhanced power supply and transformed into “points of invincibility”: here you can spend the night, take a shower, do laundry, and charge your gadgets. Last winter, when heating went out in Kyiv, the company opened additional coworking spaces on the Left Bank and in Brovary, and those who lacked autonomy were provided with powerful power banks for laptops.

Ciklum followed a similar path — all three Ukrainian locations of the company, in Kyiv, Lviv, and Dnipro, are equipped with generators, several independent Internet channels, autonomous heating, and water supplies, with the expectation that they will have to accommodate not only "their own" but also colleagues who relocate from other regions during the crisis.

But Railsware has a slightly different logic: the company has been remote-friendly since its inception, so the office here was not conceived as a centralized reception point for the entire team, but rather as an option for those who find it more convenient not to sit at home. However, it will also cope if necessary: ​​the Kyiv office has a shelter equipped with Wi-Fi, where you can go at any time.

Appflame took the most “hard” approach to preparing the office: they purchased drinking and technical water, assembled shelter kits (a sleeping mat, a sleeping bag, a folding chair) that employees can take with them to the subway or a shelter near their home, added emergency shoppers with food, water, batteries, and matches — and made sure that a tactical medical kit was within a 20-second radius of each work “space” in the office. And to be able to use these kits, the company held two consecutive weekends of home first aid training for the team.

When electricity and communications are no longer a one-time event, but part of the infrastructure

Generators and backup communication channels are hardly talked about as something extraordinary in companies anymore — it has simply become the baseline. At ZONE3000 and Ciklum, both key offices have backup power sources and several independent Internet channels, while at Appflame, the Help Desk team is separately responsible for the uninterrupted Internet connection in the office — according to the company, it was possible to make it completely stable even during a blackout.

Interestingly, Ciklum focuses not on individual points of failure, but on their interconnectedness: a prolonged power outage simultaneously affects both mobile phone coverage and the stability of home Internet for employees working remotely. Therefore, the company consciously approaches Business Continuity comprehensively — combining the autonomy of locations with separate operational support for teams.

What about a generator at home?

Some companies have gone beyond the office walls and started supporting autonomy directly at employees’ homes. Railsware has a permanent hardware budget for this purpose — it can be spent not only on standard work equipment, but also, in particular, on Starlink and charging stations: this category was added a few years ago and is still active. At Appflame, a cafeteria of benefits plays a similar role, which can be used to equip the security and autonomy of the home, including deferring payments for equipment like EcoFlow.

ZONE3000 does not have a formal tool for this — instead, the company says that it helps professionals with setting up a home workplace individually, based on each specific request.

But when it comes to budgets, Ciklum and Railsware unexpectedly agree on one thing: neither company reports a significant increase in energy autonomy costs compared to the winter of 2024–2025. Both companies started investing in this at the beginning of a full-scale war, so the main infrastructure has already been built, and current expenses are more likely part of the usual operating budget than a separate “winter” estimate. Ciklum only supports and updates what is available, while Railsware has even managed to move to a better-equipped office in Kyiv with full shelter during this time.

The main risk is not technology, but people

When it comes to the biggest risk to continuous operation, companies answer almost oppositely to each other — depending on what they emphasize. In ZONE3000, the first place is not infrastructure, but team safety: due to increasingly massive enemy attacks, the most important priority here is the ability of a person to recover — employees can take a day off to recover or move if they find themselves in a dangerous place. Ciklum, on the other hand, formulates the risk systemically — as the complexity and interconnectedness of factors: electricity, communications and logistics in a blackout pull each other down, so the problem should be solved not pointwise, but at all levels at once.

Among the companies surveyed, Appflame went further in terms of overall preparedness and prepared a separate step-by-step checklist in case the office is directly affected: where to go in that case, which coworking spaces and buses to use, which providers to switch to.

Relocation: from $1000 for moving to a program in Poland with a ten-year history

Almost all of the companies surveyed support relocation in one way or another — although they understand it in different ways.

At EPAM, this is a clearly structured seasonal program: last winter, relocation was opened for colleagues from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy, Dnipro, Zaporizhia and the regions of these cities, with financial support of $1,000 for independent organization of moving and accommodation — up to a thousand people took advantage of it. This year, the company plans to activate Winter BCP earlier than usual, and is currently surveying the team about their readiness for a difficult winter and temporary relocation.

Ciklum offers financial assistance primarily to colleagues from the southern and eastern regions, and is preparing a separate program for employees from Kyiv and the region. Domestically, the company advises considering the western regions, and abroad — countries with their own delivery centers: Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Spain, Slovakia. And, unlike Railsware, a clear trend has been noticed here: this year there are more requests for relocation than last year — colleagues want to prepare in advance after the experience of last winter.

At Railsware, relocation is not so much an anti-crisis measure as it has long been a built-in part of the culture: the company is remote-friendly, and the most worked-out scenario here is moving to Poland under a program that has been around for over ten years. The company covers key moving and legalization costs — consultations, paperwork, travel for the employee and family, temporary housing, real estate services, and support with a residence permit. But Poland is no limit: the team now has specialists from about 30 countries, so you can move anywhere you want, organizing it yourself. And it is thanks to such a long history that Railsware has not recorded any atypical surge in interest in moving this year — the demand for this option, according to their observations, naturally fluctuates from year to year.

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