Case study: Databarracks provides DRaaS and BaaS for Dorset’s largest law firm
The Challenge
Sam Gold is the IT Operations Manager at Lester Aldridge. He took the position in November 2019 as part of a drive to modernise and improve the firm’s IT systems.
“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.”
Sam and his team began the task of selecting the best solution for the job.
“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 Solution
Lester Aldridge selected Databarracks to provide Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The technologies selected were Zerto for Disaster Recovery and Commvault for Backup – both using Microsoft Azure as the target environment.
The team got to work immediately, first setting up the Disaster Recovery solution.
“We started with DR because that was a higher priority. 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.
“The Databarracks team are brilliant. The engineers are true professionals and have a really good attitude and approach to their work. We have a great relationship with our technical leads Baptist and James and have found the whole team easy to work with.
“Nothing is too much trouble, and they always go above and beyond to make sure our needs are met. They’re knowledgeable and efficient and make the service what it is. Ultimately, they just get things done which is exactly what I value in an IT partner.
“Once Backup and DR were set up, the difference was immediately obvious compared with how the system was running prior to Databarracks.”
The Benefits
“As an organisation, we’re now almost completely paperless. 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.”
Faster recovery with Zerto
Sam also noted the improvement in recovery speed.
“Zerto has proven to be robust and reliable technology but the single biggest improvement we noticed is the recovery speed. It’s incredibly quick, far faster than our incumbent solution. Faster recoveries mean less downtime for the firm and less potential revenue lost.”
Client audits
IT continuity and uptime is also increasingly a requirement for the firm’s clients.
“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.”
