Law firm goes live with BlackBerry business continuity

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Davies Arnold Cooper, an international law firm specialising in real estate and dispute resolution, is just about to go live with new continuous availability and disaster recovery technology for its BlackBerry estate.

The company will switch on its new Neverfail disaster recovery system on Thursday this week, to ensure this increasingly mission-critical communications channel is always available to the 90 fee-earning users and 40 support staff that have come to rely on their BlackBerry wireless email devices.

Stuart Cowell, head of IT at Davies Arnold Cooper, told IT PRO the new system would mitigate any risk to the business through loss of email contact for these staff while mobile, as well as protect confidential client communications and ensure the firm's speed of response.

"Disaster recovery is something we wanted to nip in the bud as more and more Blackberrys were rolled out to users," said Cowell. "It protects the systems from downtime, which also ensures our availability from a client perspective. And it answers any concerns about data security with these devices."

The Neverfail system protects against the affects of any IT failure that may affect the firm's BlackBerry Enterprise server over both large and wide area networks (LANs and WANs). It replicates application-specific data between active and passive servers in real time so that, in the event of a potential problem or failure, it can take pre-emptive action to alert administrators to avoid resorting to a full-system failover.

In the event of failover, Neverfail connects users to the passive server so business can continue without interruption. Cowell said this had the added benefit of allowing the IT team to carry out patch management and upgrade tasks without risking system downtime.

"We can failover to the passive server to carry out maintenance, which is valuable because users rely on their Blackberries at precisely the out-of-work times we'd normally have to schedule such work in," he said.

Cowell said an added benefit was the ability for the new system to ensure the firm can continue working on clients' behalf in the event of a disaster. "This is mandated by the new Solicitor's Code of Conduct," he said of the regulation updated in July.

Avanquest Solutions provided the Neverfail disaster recovery system for Davies Arnold Cooper.

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