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Kennedys was an early adopter of virtualisation and the introduction of a virtualised environment has supported the firm’s expansion strategy and growing international reach by increasing flexibility and facilitating the launch and integration of new offices faster and more cost effectively. IT director Ian Lauwerys sets the scene. ‘In the legal industry – an industry that places special importance on trust – the need to deliver on promises and meet high expectations is all-important. Giving lawyers round-the-clock access to confidential case notes and business-critical applications from wherever they are working allows the firm to offer a consistent service and meet what are often challenging deadlines.’

As we go to press, Kennedys is in the process of relocating its London headquarters to new offices in Fenchurch Avenue. Virtualisation is a key part of this major project. ‘We took the opportunity of the move to virtualise our core infrastructure into a new data centre,’ explains Lauwerys. ‘All our main applications – our practice management system and most of the document management system (DMS) – are run centrally out of London. There were originally about 40 main servers at our Chiswell Street offices. ‘We now have seven virtual servers running out of an offsite data centre plus three in a separate disaster recovery data centre. Everything is synchronised across the network to support disaster recovery and business continuity capability, so if there are problems at our main data centre we can switch across very quickly.’ Both data centres are offsite – one is in west London and the other is in the East End – so that in the event of a serious outage at any of the firm’s buildings all the data would be recovered from when it last synchronised,’ he adds.

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For further information, please contact:
Melissa Powell
Spreckley Partners Ltd
T: 020 7388 9988
E: powell(at)spreckley.co.uk

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