Hamburger Hamburger Hamburger
en_in

Taylor Wessing increases IT agility, security and resilience

Taylor Wessing

SOLUTION

MultiCloud Acceleration Solution

SERVICE

Cloud Migration

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

Challenge

Challenge:

Modernize IT environment to increase security and accelerate innovation, Transition from physical data center to the cloud

Solution

Solution:

Assessed current environment and business needs, Migrated applications, test and development environments to the cloud, Executed cloud strategies: Infrastructure as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery as-a-Service and cloud collaboration

Outcomes

  • Accelerated provisioning of servers and storage from months or weeks to hours or minutes
  • Strengthened protection against cyber threats
  • Simplified process for lawyers to work securely from anywhere

Background

  • Full-service international law firm
  • Serves clients in agile and progressive industries
  • Applies innovative thinking to IT

Taylor Wessing is a full-service international law firm with 420 partners and 1200 lawyers in 33 offices around the world. Its client roster includes companies in the world’s most agile and progressive industries, including technology, media, communications, life sciences and energy. The firm has forged a reputation for helping clients succeed by thinking innovatively about business issues.

Taylor Wessing also applies innovative thinking to IT. For example, the firm’s developers have created apps that clients use to compare intellectual property protections in various countries, prepare for and respond to data breaches, and follow developments in the media and technology sectors.

Business Challenge

Taylor Wessing has a state-of-the-art primary data center, but its failover data center was aging. The firm launched an initiative to modernize IT.

The goals: stronger cyber security, greater resilience, faster delivery of innovative IT services for clients and staff, a way to experiment with new IT services without making a large infrastructure investment, and more convenient collaboration.

Building a new on-premises data center would cost more than US$269,000 and require a large investment of time. Although a managed data center service would cost less, it would still require an investment in dedicated equipment – and wouldn’t scale on demand. Taylor Wessing decided to investigate public clouds, and looked for assistance in determining which cloud would best fit the firm’s needs for resilience, security and cost–effectiveness.

Hitachi has in-depth knowledge of how to adopt cloud technologies and apply them to our business. Our consultants talked in terms of business outcomes and made the technology come to life.

– Kevin Harris, IT Director, Taylor Wessing

“Overall, cloud technologies have given us the flexibility and the capability to do more with the same team of people, putting more value back into the business. It’s a great solution for platform stability and has strengthened our ability to compete in the international marketplace.”
– Richard Skinner, Senior Enterprise Architect., Taylor Wessing

Solution

Migrate to Azure, guided by Hitachi Consulting
For guidance on migrating to the cloud, Taylor Wessing engaged Hitachi Consulting. “Hitachi has in-depth knowledge of how to adopt cloud technologies and apply them to our business,” said Kevin Harris, IT Director at Taylor Wessing. “Our consultants talked in terms of business outcomes and made the technology come to life.”

As the first step, Hitachi thoroughly assessed business needs, applications and infrastructure. The output:

  • Decommission the failover data center and use Microsoft Azure for disaster recovery.
  • Move test and development to Azure, using infrastructure as-a-Service (laaS).
  • Gradually migrate most applications in the primary data center to Azure, lowering space, power and cooling costs.
  • Migrate from on-premises Microsoft Exchange and Skype servers to the cloud versions: Exchange Online and Skype for Business.
  • Simplify mobile device management using Microsoft Intune, part of the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).

The plan in place, Hitachi Consulting executed the migration.

Value Delivered

Innovating faster with the cloud
The firm’s developers no longer have to wait for the IT team to provision infrastructure. Now they use a self-service portal to provision servers and storage for new projects in minutes or hours-down from weeks or months. One innovative new service: applying artificial intelligence to review case documents, freeing lawyers to focus on more strategic and advisory tasks.

Increasing resilience with Disaster Recovery as-a-Service
If the primary data center goes down, the firm can continue serving clients without interruption. Hitachi implemented Azure Site Recovery, which automatically replicates virtual machines from the primary data center to Azure.

Strengthening security
The on-premises data center couldn’t keep up with rapidly changing cyber threats. Now, Taylor Wessing benefits from advanced security technologies that Microsoft constantly updates. And with its global client base, Taylor Wessing appreciates that Microsoft complies with both international and industry-specific standards. Improvements include identity and access management; monitoring, logging and auditing capabilities; network security; data security; configuration management and threat management.

Adopting smarter ways of working
As part of Taylor Wessing’s Office 365 implementation, Hitachi migrated employee accounts from on-premises Exchange and Skype servers to Exchange Online and Skype for Business. Improved mailbox management makes it easier to work from home, a client’s office, the courtroom or anywhere else.

Lowering costs
With cloud computing, Taylor Wessing pays only for the services it needs. The IT team can scale processing or storage capacity up or down with a few clicks. No need to overprovision in anticipation of growth.

“Overall, cloud technologies have given us the flexibility and the capability to do more with the same team of people, putting more value back into the business,” said Richard Skinner, Senior Enterprise Architect for Taylor Wessing. “It’s a great solution for platform stability and has strengthened our ability to compete in the international marketplace.”

Explore More

{ "FirstName": "First Name", "LastName": "Last Name", "Email": "Business Email", "Title": "Job Title", "Company": "Company Name", "Address": "Address", "City": "City", "State":"State", "Country":"Country", "Phone": "Business Telephone", "LeadCommentsExtended": "Additional Information(optional)", "LblCustomField1": "What solution area are you wanting to discuss?", "ApplicationModern": "Application Modernization", "InfrastructureModern": "Infrastructure Modernization", "Other": "Other", "DataModern": "Data Modernization", "GlobalOption": "If you select 'Yes' below, you consent to receive commercial communications by email in relation to Hitachi Vantara's products and services.", "GlobalOptionYes": "Yes", "GlobalOptionNo": "No", "Submit": "Submit", "EmailError": "Must be valid email.", "RequiredFieldError": "This field is required." }
en