London, UK: 31 July, 2006: Irwin Mitchell (IM) the UK’s eighth largest law firm is working with SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider in Information Availability and business continuity to help it comply with clients’ legal requirements and ISO security compliance initiatives. IM has replicated Cisco VoIP telephony technology, email and printing capabilities, case management systems, and back-office billing applications, providing the ability to recover data to SunGard’s London Technology Centre. The company also has an agreement with SunGard to make use of SunGard’s Workplace Recovery centres providing physical workspaces should its offices become unavailable.
IM offers a complete range of legal services to both businesses and individuals ranging from personal injury to insurance to employment services. Recent work has involved MRSA claims, acting for a Premiership football manager in a number of defamation and slander disputes and claims relating to Working Time Regulations. Gary Thomas, head of IT, IM 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 two or three hours and we have significantly reduced our storage costs.”
When evaluating Information Availability providers, IM 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 only work with leaders in each technology segment like 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.”
Irwin Mitchell shows confidence with live test
One of the firm’s most important functions is its inbound contact centre. To guard against call centre downtime, IM replicated its VoIP telephony to numerous SunGard Workplace Recovery centres so it can continue taking customer calls on the same phone numbers and extensions without any noticeable change for its customers. Gary Smith, head of IT at IM, said: “Our customer call centre handles over 6,000 calls a day and must always be active. We carried out a dress rehearsal with key staff from all areas of the business to test the SunGard VoIP backup plan during working hours and the test was a great success. Our customers were unaffected, and unaware of the test conditions, which is the ultimate goal.”
The test was in part to ready the company for ISO 17799 compliance, an internationally recognised information security standard that includes security policy, physical and environmental security and business continuity management (BCM).
Keith Tilley, UK managing director and senior vice president Europe, SunGard Availability Services, said: “Irwin Mitchell is a very technically aware company that having identified telephony as a mission-critical application has taken steps to avoid downtime. Many service-based companies are likely to follow IM’s lead to create an ‘always on, always ready’ telephony infrastructure, as organisations become increasingly passionate about VoIP savings.“
About SunGard Availability Services
SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability services, helping to ensure that more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe have access to their business-critical information systems. With over three million square feet of hardened facilities, SunGard offers a complete range of iInformation aAvailability services for more than 30 technology platforms, from 48 hour disaster recovery hot sites to always-on, high-availability infrastructure, co-location and electronic vaulting services. SunGard also provides technology and systems management services for application and data centre outsourcing, as well as business continuity consulting services and planning software. Visit SunGard Availability Services UK at www.sungard.co.uk.