IBB Law is a leading full-service law firm in the Thames Valley, West London and the western Home Counties.
Databarracks provides Backup as a Service for IBB’s critical legal systems and Office 365 data.
Jamie Leaphard is the IT Service Delivery Manager and has worked at the firm for twenty-three years.
“Over the time I have been here, the firm has grown and changed significantly. IBB is a full-service firm and supporting the wide range of practice areas certainly keeps life varied and interesting.
“We have a team of 10 in IT, including Training, Development and the Service Desk. We support around 110 fee earners across our offices in Chesham, Uxbridge and Reading.
“Before Databarracks, our backup solution was between two of our sites and managed internally. When we came to replace that solution, there were two key areas we were looking to improve.
“We wanted our backups completely off-site and we wanted to outsource the day-to-day management to reduce the burden on the team.
“The critical systems we rely on are our Practice Management, Document Management, Dictation and Productivity Systems. We need granular recovery of individual items, fast recovery of entire systems and long-term retention of data for compliance purposes.
“Databarracks were recommended to us as a Backup solution for law firms that we should evaluate.”
I really do think of our backup engineers as an extension to our team… Our Databarracks engineers have worked with us for years, they know our systems and they know us.
Databarracks protects approximately 60 servers and data for 200 Office 365 users for IBB Law with Commvault and Azure.
“During our relationship with Databarracks, we have changed the backup software and the location of the backups. We now use Commvault and back up to Microsoft Azure. We have also added an on-site storage appliance for fast local recoveries. What hasn’t changed is the service.
“Transitioning to any new system is usually a time-consuming process but the benefit of the managed service was that our engineers at Databarracks did that for us. Tom managed the transition to Commvault, and it all went very smoothly.
“The upgrade brought several benefits. It allows us to protect our Office 365 data with the same solution we use for our on-premises IT. It reduced our spend by taking advantage of low cost of storage in Azure. Lastly, it improved our recovery speeds.
“As an example, recently I needed to create a Test & Dev environment for our Document Management System. That required the recovery of 4 databases, including a very large, 90GB database. It took only 15 minutes.”
For Jamie, the most important aspect of the solution is the managed service.
“In IT, you are only as good as your last backup. The worst thing that can happen is that when you need to recover, you find your backups failed or are incomplete. The benefit to me is that I have experts checking on the health of my backups every day. When there are problems, they resolve them and make sure we are always protected.
“I really do think of our backup engineers as an extension to our team. There are a lot of suppliers who have high staff turnover and we don’t build those relationships. Our Databarracks engineers have worked with us for years, they know our systems and they know us.
“Another advantage for me is that I don’t make recoveries every day. When I do need to recover data, it’s good to have help from engineers who do.
“Ultimately, the responsibility for making restores for the firm falls to me. It helps me sleep knowing that it’s well looked-after, the tech works and I have assistance whenever I need it.
“We’ve navigated a lot of change in IT recently. We always provided remote access, but it wasn’t in high demand until the lockdown. The immediate changeover actually went smoothly and we have since improved the experience with new devices and standardised management and access.
“The other major change we have been adapting to is the increase in cyber threats. That is a challenge we are addressing on multiple fronts. We are improving user behaviour with education and phishing tests and we are adopting sophisticated detection technologies. The final piece of our cyber defences is a reliable backup solution, ready to recover quickly whenever we need it.