Elly Yates-Roberts |
Burness Paull is one of Scotland’s leading independent commercial law firms. With 71 partners, over 540 employees, and offices in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, the firm is deeply rooted in the sector’s affecting its Scottish and international clients, including financial services, energy, technology, property and infrastructure, and food and drink.
All of Burness Paull’s employees rely on its IT system to function on a day-to-day basis. It powers key legal functionalities such as dictation, billing and recording times, so avoiding downtime is key. As the firm mainly deals with digital legal files and sensitive client data, it is also vital that the data is protected at all times. The company takes part in regular testing to comply with Information Security Standard ISO27001. However, it was previously using failover replication on its storage area networks (SANs), which replicated the data storage on virtual machines. In terms of testing, this proved to be disruptive for the company, as the IT team had to manually break replication and bring up data on the storage site.
In today’s ‘always-on’ world, Burness Paull’s clients expect 100 per cent uptime, so the firm needed an IT resilience solution that could ensure this target was achievable. Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform made completing regulatory failover tests quick, easy and simple for the firm’s IT team. It has given Burness Paull and its customers the confidence that it can constantly provide optimal uptime, with the assurance that if an outage were to occur, the firm would be back online in seconds.
The IT Resilience Platform has aided in other areas as well as disaster recovery. Burness Paull now uses Zerto to help with its cloud migration as the IT Resilience Platform can integrate with on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Zerto is agnostic, meaning it is compatible across all the firm’s SANs. This creates a ‘single pane of glass’ for replication across the sites, simplifying management and improving visibility.
“Implementing Zerto was one of the best decisions we, as an IT team, have made,” says Billy Kirkwood, IT director at Burness Paull. “Not only has it saved us a lot of headaches, it has made the migration to infrastructure-as-a-service a lot easier. We are now able to prove to auditors that we have the ability to failover with Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform, providing the ‘always-on’ service that our colleagues and clients expect.”
This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.