SunGard protects mission-critical VoIP for leading law firm

Irwin Mitchell, the UK’s eighth largest law firm, is working with SunGard Availability Services, to help it comply with clients’ legal requirements and ISO security compliance initiatives. Irwin Mitchell has replicated Cisco VoIP telephony technology, e-mail and printing capabilities and case management systems providing the ability to recover data to SunGard’s London Technology Centre. The firm also has an agreement with SunGard to make use of SunGard’s Workplace Recovery centres providing physical workspaces should its offices become unavailable.

Irwin Mitchell offers a complete range of legal services to both businesses and individuals ranging from personal injury to insurance to employment services. Gary Thomas, head of IT operations, Irwin Mitchell said: “The sensitive legal landscape means we have to manage our data with the highest standards. It must be stored in a secure environment that guarantees the highest integrity and availability. Before working with SunGard it would take about three days to recover data in the event of a disruption. Our recovery time is now reduced to less than eight hours with a recovery point objective for some data of one hour.

When evaluating Information Availability providers, Irwin Mitchell was looking for a company that could provide a secure data recovery environment to mirror hardware and applications and provide multiple physical backup office space across the UK. Mr. Thomas said: “We are very serious about the technology companies we partner with and tend to work with leaders in each technology segment such as Cisco, Microsoft, and SunGard. SunGard won the deal on the back of its ability to scale technically to its highly secure London Technology Centre. Its UK network of backup office space is ideal to meet the demands from our employees across our six UK offices.”

One of the Irwin Mitchell’s most important functions is its inbound contact centre. To guard against call centre downtime, Irwin Mitchell has the ability to replicate its VoIP telephony to numerous SunGard Workplace Recovery centres in the UK such that it can continue taking client calls on the same phone numbers and extensions without any noticeable change for its customers.

Gary Thomas explains, “Our client contact centre handles over 6,000 calls a day and is therefore is a vital element to the operation. We carried out a dress rehearsal with key staff from all areas of the business to test the SunGard VoIP backup plan. This consisted of a full recovery test to a SunGard workplace recovery centre during working hours. The test was a great success as our clients were unaffected, and unaware of the test conditions, which is our ultimate goal.”

The test was part of the firm’s obligations for the ISO 270001 Information Security Management standard attained earlier in the year.

http://www.sungard.co.uk

•Date: 4th August 2006• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: BC general
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