ABOUT THE COMPANY
Charles Russell's 200 years of diligent client service has given it a unique position, successfully combining traditional values with the progressive practices of a modern commercial firm. With 500 staff, 76 Partners and close associations with overseas law firms, Charles Russell makes extensive use of information technology to support all its activities, generating and storing communications with clients, as a resource for professional lawyers, for knowledge management, for business management and for communications around the world.

THE REQUIREMENT
Information technology within Charles Russell is aligned for quality and performance with all other aspects of the firm's work - assuring the security and integrity of all data held is an important area but one that was taking up lots of time for the IT team of 16. Another issue was that backups were creating demands on the system surging the working day when traffic volumes were highest.

With business growth driving an increase in Charles Russell's data volumes and with constant archiving requirements, the decision was taken to use the VBAK service for all the firm's data backups.

THE VBAK SOLUTION
"I am looking for services that will make life simpler and will also enable us to get things done as fast and efficiently as possible," says IT Director Jon Gould. "There is only a finite amount of time and resource for any activity. Why give effort to something that somebody else can take away? VBAK solves the particular problem of backup and takes the drudgery away."

"it's a case of getting the job done and having the confidence of knowing it has been done."

"If something goes wrong here, we won't suffer the dread scenario that the backup has not worked, or it has been forgotten that day. Manual backup can be very haphazard - all the time you are relying on someone else doing what you asked them to do. With the best will in the world, this is not always a secure assumption.

THE TECHNOLOGY
VBAK is a fully automated solution using a private leased line to backup customer data to a remote Data Centre where it is stored on disk. The software incorporates 56-bit DES encryption to ensure the security and integrity of all data. A Customer Administrator Console is set up at the customer premises for setting backup schedules and carrying out data restores.

Using advanced technologies such as Common File Elimination, VBAK keeps data volumes to a minimum so that only changed data is backed up.

Backups are scheduled to meet Charles Russell's daily operational patterns and a 24-hour operations support and monitoring service is included in the service. data backup does not intrude on IT systems during working hours, enabling the systems to carry more traffic with no need for upgrades.

Our VBAK team delivers the fully managed service controlling every aspect of implementation, including training where required. For the future, VBAK is scaleable - so as Charles Russell acquire more servers and more data, this can be included within the VBAK service.

BUSINESS BENEFITS
The confidential and business data held be Charles Russell has to be safeguarded and this is now assured with VBAK. In addition, the company's valuable IT staff is released for non-routine tasks.

FINAL WORD
"I am not the only IT Director who has a limited amount of time and resources. Increasingly, the key for technologists lies in dealing with strategic and business issues and leaving operational issues at the door."

"The idea of smart outsourcing pays off when you find people who can do something more cost effectively and efficiently that yourselves'" concludes Jon Gould.