UK top 200 law firm Lester Aldridge has selected Databarracks to provide Backup as a Service and Disaster Recovery as a Service following a competitive tender process.
Led by IT operations manager Sam Gold, the Dorset firm, which has offices in Bournemouth, Southampton and London, says that Databarracks was selected over two shortlisted vendors thanks to its Microsoft Azure-based solution.
Gold joined the firm in 2019 and says: “When I first joined, we carried out an initial evaluation of the infrastructure across the firm’s three locations. We began an infrastructure modernisation project to support the strategic development of the firm which included, everything from hardware to hosting and IT resilience. Backup and Disaster Recovery were central elements of the project.
“We conducted a detailed and competitive tender process, evaluating the various technologies and propositions available. We eventually narrowed down a long list of options to just three.
“The deciding factor for us was that Databarracks’ solution used Microsoft Azure. The other options we considered were more like traditional VMware hosting. This is a more modern proposition taking advantage of the public cloud, so we have resources available when we need them. As a result, costs are kept very low most of the time when the recovery environment is not in use and only increases when we need to test or invoke.”
The Lester Aldridge team started with DR, which was the higher priority. Gold says: “The biggest issue was actually getting the connectivity operational, but the Databarracks team approached the issue patiently and effectively.
“Next, we moved onto Backup. At this point we had a good relationship with the engineers and the Databarracks team knew our environment well so getting set up was even faster.”
He added: “Once Backup and DR were set up, the difference was immediately obvious compared with how the system was running prior to Databarracks.”
As an organisation, Gold says that Lester Aldridge is now almost completely paperless, commenting: “That means all the manual, paper-based processes have been digitised – which is great for making the firm more efficient and automated. But it’s bad for IT downtime.
“Law firms operate on chargeable hours, so if systems are down, the firm fundamentally ceases to trade and that translates directly into lost revenue. I feel confident knowing that if we do have any issues, Databarracks are there ready to recover systems immediately. It’s a managed service for our IT resilience and continuity.”
IT continuity plans are increasingly a client requirement and Gold said: “A number of our clients, particularly in financial services require that we have solid resilience and business continuity plans in place. In many cases, we are audited annually and required to show that we have tested our plans and can meet our recovery objectives. If we can’t prove it, it puts us in a very difficult position.
“Working with Databarracks makes this process much simpler because we can clearly show what we have in place, along with details of our recovery speeds and tests. We have recently gained ISO27001 accreditation for Information Security and again, having Databarracks with us really helped.”