Case study: Law firm upgrades WAN to support disaster recovery

Michelmores strikes a tough bargain with KCOM Group for WAN upgrade and disaster recovery plan

Solicitors at Michelmores' Exeter office use videoconferencing to liaise with colleagues in London

Exeter-based firm of solicitors Michelmores has upgraded its wide area network (WAN) to support its disaster recovery policy and give 300 users spread across four UK sites faster access to hosted applications.

The company was reaching the end of its current [WAN provision] contract last year, and wanted to make the most of its buying power at a time when so many IT vendors are struggling to find customers willing to invest in new projects, Michelmores head of IT Simon Clarke told Computing.

“We went out to market just as we were entering the recession so there were commercial opportunities to find a good business partner anyway,” he said.

“We needed a more robust business continuity plan, and already had a virtualised environment, and wanted to use that to save some money on putting disaster recovery plans into place.”

Any cost savings were swallowed by increased storage and network capacity, which saw the link between Exeter and Michelmores' central London office double in size from 2Mbit/s to 4Mbit/s.

A co-location site in Bristol is now linked by a 10Mbit/s point-to-point Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) circuit using DoubleTake software for real-time data replication.

KCOM is a specialist communications provider created by the merger of Kingston Communications (operating outside Hull and East Yorkshire) and Affiniti in November last year.

It delivers a range of services and applications to large public and private sector organisations, including business continuity, broadband connectivity, often utilising BT Wholesale network capacity, and application and infrastructure hosting services that see it manage both physical and virtual hardware on its customers’ behalf.

While all Michelmores' apps are hosted on remote servers, its documents are stored locally on site for privacy and security reasons.

“We have about 300 users in total, all accessing legal-specific business ap plications, email and digital dictation software,” said Clarke. “We use Citrix to deliver some of that, and SAS for email security and internet filtering.”

Michelmores also uses Avaya’s Definity IP telephony platform and Polycom’s videoconferencing platform to link both its own employees, and often its clients in different parts of the UK and elsewhere in the world.

“We used videoconferencing before, but we were experiencing some difficulty with the IP overhead, so increasing the capacity to the London office was a way of addressing that,” said Clarke.

“It saves partners the time and effort of travelling, and we have licences for multipoint application sharing as well, like Excel for example.”

The legal firm is currently in the final testing phase of a new bespoke customer relationship management (CRM) application, developed locally by a west country software development team, with Michelmores designing middleware to help the CRM app talk to its practice management systems.