Today's CIOs and IT professionals face numerous challenges, tasked with directives relating to business productivity, compliance issues, service-level agreements and more. In the legal industry especially, our priority is to identify and implement effective technologies that align with business requirements. The ability to recover data in the wake of a disaster and continue to serve our clients is a top priority at Sheppard Mullin. The 550-attorney firm has eight of its eleven offices in earthquake and fire prone California (with additional offices in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanghai). As a result, disaster recovery was one of the most important IT projects facing the firm's IT department in 2008. Sheppard Mullin took steps to implement a successful disaster recovery solution to ensure that the firm and its clients (many of whom are among the Fortune 100) would not experience business or service disruption.
BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGICAL DRIVERS FOR DISASTER RECOVERY
Most law firms have some type of disaster recovery system in place. But in the aftermath of 9/11, the legal industry re-evaluated the adequacy of existing data protection standards. True disaster recovery means that data must be accessible at the same speed and with the same integrity as it was before a disaster or event (e.g., natural or man-made disasters, viruses, power disruptions). Some companies have the potential of going out of business within one year of sustaining a multi-day outage, making a strong case that businesses are only as safe and viable as their disaster recovery measures.
Sheppard Mullin's data centers and the majority of our servers are housed in our Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., offices, with a planned transition to a collocation facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. Currently, we maintain individual Microsoft Exchange Servers at each of our 11 locations, with plans for server consolidation and use of WAN optimization devices when we move to the collocation facility. Our IT infrastructure is Windows-centric, utilizing SQL Server as the back-end database application and VMware for server virtualization. We were using tape backup and off-site storage, but the threat of regional disasters prompted the search for more feature-rich disaster recovery technology.
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Source: law.com
By: Donna Paulson
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