Client story Multinational Law Firm Protects and Secures Critical Business Assets
After a security incident, a thriving international law firm leveraged cloud for disaster recovery to better secure their critical assets.
By Insight Editor / 24 Jan 2024 / Topics: Backup & recovery Modern infrastructure Cloud Cybersecurity
Facts at a glance
Client industry
Legal services
Challenge:
Shift data center strategy to prioritize security and disaster recovery.
Solution:
Near-zero downtime migration and cloud-based disaster recovery
Insight provided:
- Environment discovery & assessment with SnapStart engine
- Analysis and workload application dependency mapping
- Colocation facility solution design
- Migration bundling, planning and management
- Disaster Recovery design and architecture in Microsoft Azure
Outcomes:
Download the client story
- Migration cost savings of 2–3 months/$500,000+
- Successful consolidation of data centers 2:1
- 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) and 1PB of data moved
- Efficient, cost effective and validated disaster recovery
- Better use of cloud-based resources
The client
Founded in the 19th century, the client is an established law firm with physical offices in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The firm serves clients in the corporate and public sectors on a wide range of issues, including intellectual property and international law.
The challenge: Shift data center strategy to prioritize security and disaster recovery.
The client was operating on-premises data centers with aging infrastructure and less-than ideal performance. When the client was hit with an unexpected security incident, it became acutely apparent that the shortcomings of their IT environment were not just inconvenient but a source of significant business risk. Lesson learned, the client set out to optimize their existing data centers, leverage cloud capabilities for disaster recovery, and gain efficiencies of alternative Software as a Service (SaaS) applications where possible. They also considered data erasure and destruction, to further reduce their overall exposure.
The solution: Near-zero downtime migration and cloud-based disaster recovery
Insight was determined the partner of choice to help the client accomplish their goals. In us, the law firm found an experienced and trusted data center migration partner to manage, plan, and execute the migration of their production data center and enable disaster recovery in Microsoft® Azure® through the following phases:
- Program management
- Discovery & application mapping
- Desired future state definition (secure colocation facility)
- Best practice architecture and operational design
- Detailed migration planning
- Azure disaster recovery enablement and testing
It was essential that migrations minimized downtime, as there were unavoidable repercussions to client-facing applications tied to the client’s revenue streams. Preparations and move events were planned accordingly. The Insight team leveraged our SnapStart engine for data collection and analysis as part of the discovery phase. Using SnapStart helped the client save two–three months of time and roughly $500,000–700,000 in costs compared to traditional discovery methods.
The benefits: Expertly managed data center transformation, modern IT environment, and better business continuity
With the migration plans built by Insight, the client experienced a transition that is as seamless and low impact as possible. Our proven methodology and SnapStart discovery tool made clear the client’s IT assets that would need to be considered for migration/decommissioning, including 220 Virtual Machines (VMs) that the client was not aware of.
The client is once again able to prioritize what has always mattered most in its 175-year history: delivering outstanding service to legal clients.
