Concerns: Business Continuity and Reliability
The client is a large law firm based in West Yorkshire specialising in criminal law, family law, personal injury, conveyancing, employment law and serious and complex crime. They employ over 40 staff and have a heavy reliance on IT in particular for communications both email and telephone system, legal case management system and accounting.
Areas of Concerns
The business is located on a single site and any loss of IT services during working hours creates back log and impacts on the performance of the business. There were concerns over the present IT support who seemed to have let them down when recovering selected files from a backup. This area of data seemed to have been overlooked when the backup schedule was configured, causing further delays and difficulties for the firm. Remote access to emails and data from senior partners seemed to be unreliable and inconsistent when working from home. Senior partners would also like to use iPads for emails and be able to access their case management system for potential clients remotely, whilst on the customer’s site.
An IT Risk and Health Assessment identified that in the event of the loss of one of the main servers it could take several days for the business to get back to normal. The original installation hadn’t taken into account a RAID system for the disks holding the system and data. The back-up of essential operating system files and curtain data areas hadn’t been selected. The security updates and patches hadn’t been checked or applied.
Solution
Working with the client DDS implemented an upgrade to the disk array that enabled a more reliable and stable data storage using RAID 5 hot swap drives that allows for any single disk in the array to fail having no impact on the system running. This failure in the original configuration would have meant the system would be unusable until repaired and a back-up recovery would have delayed this even further. In the event of a drive having problems or complete failure then DDS will automatically be alerted with our 24 x 7 proactive monitoring and an engineer could then replace the disk, seamlessly and without disruption to the running of the system. The hot swap facility allows DDS to do this whilst the system is running.
DDS re-tailored the backup to cover all essential systems and data file areas, created a disaster recovery plan and backup that was stored off site in DDS’s fireproof safe (data protection certificate).
DDS installed its proactive 24 x 7 monitoring service that alerts DDS automatically of any security, services or back-ups that fail or show signs of having problems before they develop into a critical state that may impact on the firm’s systems and business. Once in place DDS then provided a totally managed IT service support to maintain the system in place.