Law firm Bird & Bird has selected a brace of products from Neverfail to beef up its business continuity system – Neverfail for RIM BlackBerry and Cluster Protector.
The BlackBerry platform means that the firm has a backup if its primary BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) goes down. It has been rolled out to around 250 users in Bird & Bird’s London office, who are now so reliant on their smartphones that they are regarded as a necessity rather than a luxury, according to Jon Spencer, infrastructure manager at the company.
Given the current economic situation it’s no surprise to see many companies scale back their spending. But Spencer said that making the business case was a simple task. "I only had to convince my boss, who is actually pretty IT savvy. Once I put the figures across it made sense," he told CBR. "The lawyers of course will only see the benefit if something goes wrong with our existing systems."
Rollout was quick and simple and, most importantly, the product has already provided a return on the investment. The firm’s primary BES failed so it was automatically switched over to its secondary platform, which took less than 15 minutes. Users would not have noticed any difference to their service for the entire two-day duration of running on the backup, Spencer said.
This saved the company time and money which it would have otherwise lost due to lost productivity.
The company has not yet called on Neverfail for Cluster Protector, but Spencer says that having the system in place offer peace of mind to everyone at the firm. All 750 lawyers at the company rely on the document management system (DMS), which holds over 4TB of vital information, and if it goes down lawyers would not be able to work. Spencer estimates that lost productivity could cost the firm £1m per day.
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Neverfail for Cluster Protector ensures that any changes to documents within the DMS are replicated immediately to the firm’s secondary data centre, meaning that lawyers will know they are always using the most up to date information if the primary one goes down.
Bird & Bird is currently undergoing a number of IT projects – it also recently selected ExaGrid to deliver its backup systems – but Spencer told CBR that moving to the cloud is not yet an option for the company. "There are still a number of security issues, particularly regarding handing over your data, where it is, who manages it," Spencer told CBR. "I’m sure take up will happen, but probably bit by bit. People will wait to see if it’s a success before moving there."
Bird & Bird has 21 offices around the world and specialises in multimedia, telecoms, information technology and intellectual property.
