Commercial Law Firm Impresses with DRaaS

About the Firm

The law firm is based in one of the nation’s largest cities. For over 35 years and with over 100 lawyers, they’ve delivered legal services to some of the most prestigious commercial clients.

The Vision and Challenge

The firm had a self-managed tape backup system that, after an internal audit, was found to be questionable. The IT team couldn’t adequately test the effectiveness of the backup solution, which made them unsure of recovery if a real event should occur – raising the question, could they recover from a disaster? More importantly, could they protect their client’s data in the event of a cyberattack?

Plus, the firm was being pressured to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of a financial services client (FFIEC IT Examination Handbook InfoBase, Appendix J: Strengthening the Resilience of Outsourced Technology Services). To appease their client’s regulatory demands, they required proof that data was protected with an adequate retention policy for backups. They quickly realized they needed a solution that would enable fast recovery to keep their firm running in the event of a disaster.

The firm’s small IT team felt managing backups were a huge burden, taking time away from higher priorities. They wanted to update their infrastructure from physical to virtualized components but needed to create awareness of the importance of IT disaster recovery with the firm’s partners to accomplish this goal. With a critical client demanding proof of a working resiliency strategy, this helped the IT team gain buy-in from leadership for a new solution.

The Outcome

The firm engaged with InterVision to design a resiliency solution that would match their unique needs. They settled upon a colocation solution for their production workloads and a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution to continually protect data and keep copies ready for quick recovery should a disaster strike. This ensured the technology they needed to conduct daily operations, as well as optimized budget spending.

As a result, the firm established a successful DR testing strategy to ensure systems availability across multiple threats. They also gained the ability to meet regulatory requirements for their financial service clients and increased partner confidence in their firm’s recovery capability. With InterVision managing the full solution, the IT team was able to focus on other priorities within the firm.