The Calming Influence of the Cloud

Game-changing insights in IT are few and far between. Rather than challenge the status quo, too many IT leaders are content with patching outdated software and performing tedious maintenance work for on-premise systems simply because it's what has been historically expected. This type of environment rarely produces true corporate innovation, as the IT department is challenged with being thought of as crucial to the business only when things go awry. We changed that at Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson LLP (BSW) a couple of years ago by, if you can believe it, giving ourselves less work. Let me explain.

BSW is a corporate defense law firm that was founded in 1928. We have approximately 160 users spread across our offices in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Covington, LA. IT is absolutely critical to the organization ' everything from the documents created, the phone calls made, court filings, litigation support, accounting, and even the security system, is managed by IT. It's a wide-ranging, fast-paced job that keeps my staff and me on our toes as we address everyday challenges while strategizing for a leaner, more efficient operation.

e-Mail in particular is an important part of BSW's day-to-day operations. To put it plainly, if e-mail is offline, we're in a lot of trouble. We cannot afford any downtime, as BSW employees are constantly working on a large number of high-profile cases requiring constant collaboration with clients and opposing counsel. e-Mail has evolved over the years from a simple messaging tool into not only our primary method of communication with the outside world, but also the preferred method for document delivery for many of our clients. In today's world, legal cases can be won or lost by the information contained within a single e-mail. e-Mail is our lifeblood and a critical part of the corporate IT infrastructure.

Dealing with Disaster

My perspective on e-mail had been one of necessity. It was necessary to continually maintain cumbersome appliances on-site. It was necessary to invest large sums of money into the latest and greatest security products to keep viruses, spam and phishing attacks away from users. It was necessary to back up all of our e-mail on tape (a sound enough practice to preserve information, but not one that is conducive to finding information quickly). These were my realities and it lead to an unsteady relationship between my team and the BSW e-mail infrastructure as each appliance and software product presented its own challenges. Despite all of the staff's hard work, the amount of time and effort that went into keeping the e-mail system up and running was surpassing the performance of our system.

The initial trouble when looking for a solution to the firm's problem came from its vastness; in order to fix my e-mail problem, I needed to find a better way to solve the ingrained, eternal IT problems of expensive equipment creating a complex, unwieldy infrastructure. It was this challenge that drew me to the cloud. I did my homework on cloud computing and it appeared to be the answer to my needs. BSW's IT staff would no longer need to tend to temperamental on-site appliances, the vendor would handle all software upgrades, and we could manage everything from a Web portal. The service offerings that have come about in the past four to five years have finally given us alternatives to traditional anti-spam, anti-virus, and retention appliances. I came to view the cloud as a natural IT evolution.

What solidified this line of thinking was Hurricane Katrina. It is commonly held that if your organization's operations go down for more than 48 hours, you're likely not going to reopen. It seems callous to think of the vitality of a business in the wake of an almost apocalyptic disaster, but that is the corporate environment in which we live. If you go down for a hurricane or a disaster and you're not on the grid so that your clients and employees can communicate, the clock is ticking.

Our duty to serve our clients left us with only one option: We ended up going into New Orleans under armed guard, and it's a memory that I'll always carry with me. I went with a few staff members past the devastation to fetch our e-mail servers so employees from New Orleans could have access to those critical e-mails, documents and other information necessary to service our clients. Luckily for us, it was a happy ending. However, the incident revealed just how dependent we were on our e-mail system being online at all times. In a cloud environment, these critical e-mails with document attachments would have been safely stored away in no danger of being lost and, in fact, would have been accessible to anyone with a Web browser. The last straw took place when an appliance malfunction caused delays in e-mail delivery. It was time to find a way to break the cycle. My decision was made: I had to bring BSW's e-mail to the cloud.

Mimecast Fits Needs

After reviewing several different vendors, we settled on Mimecast because it had everything that BSW needed, plus some things we had not even thought of when we started our search. The company's Unified Email Management (UEM) solution was unique not only in the wide breadth of its offerings, but also the simplicity of its value. No other vendor was able to offer anti-spam, anti-virus, e-mail continuity, archiving and record retention functionality for a predictable yearly fee. Mimecast seemed to have the tools that most specifically cater to the needs of the legal environment. Anyone having to deal with e-discovery requests within their organizations would benefit from the Litigation Hold and e-Discovery modules within the Mimecast platform.

Getting started with Mimecast was as easy a process as I have ever encountered. The majority of Mimecast's offerings could be implemented with just a few changes to our MX records. Within 48 hours, we were up and running on the Mimecast platform ' and immediately started reaping the benefits.

Our primary concern, of course, was business continuity. Mimecast UEM removes our reliance on a physical location for e-mail management. e-Mail is continually routed through Mimecast's multi-tenant global infrastructure so there is never any downtime.

Another great feature was Mimecast's high-level of integration with Microsoft Exchange. Mimecast enables employees to work within the familiar Outlook interface, thus reducing the amount of training time. This is absolutely critical because the fastest way to receive a large number of help tickets is to replace employee-facing legacy systems with solutions that require users to alter their workflows. It is said that the best-laid plans of IT often fall at the hands of policies or technologies that “interfere” with employee productivity, and we had no interest in doing that. After all, technology should compliment whatever business it serves, not overshadow it. Mimecast users do not become overwhelmed with learning a new e-mail system that is so critical to their day-to-day lives. I look forward to exploring the more advanced features that the Exchange integration offers as we finalize our e-mail migration to that platform this year.

Business Advantages

Aside from functionality, partnering with a cloud vendor provided my team with a significant number of business advantages. IT complexity was a critical issue for BSW as we had to maintain not only our actual e-mail servers, but also the various appliances that were involved in the mail flow. This involved a rotating list of manual IT tasks, such as software patches, firmware updates, the restoration of deleted e-mails, creating backup files for critical business data and searching e-mail archives for information requested by an employee. These tasks were a huge time sink for my IT staff and prevented them from working on larger, more strategic projects. It was a no-win situation because these chores, though menial, could not be ignored. Additionally, if there was any problem with our e-mail delivery, we would have to check multiple points to determine the cause, which served only to delay a resolution. Cloud computing simplifies BSW's IT infrastructure and saves department staff from having to devote precious time to areas that are now handled by Mimecast.

Consistent pricing is also a major benefit of cloud computing solutions. Gone are the days where my department's budget was in a state of constant flux due to the disposition of any single piece of hardware or software. If a piece of hardware went down, there was no option but to replace it, making budgeting difficult, if not impossible. Now, I simply pay the yearly fee and reap the benefits without having to worry about inopportune expenses.

Conclusion

If you're looking to test the cloud waters, e-mail is an excellent place to start. If your IT infrastructure is anything like BSW's used to be, eliminating complexity, adding an additional layer of “always-on” business continuity, and realigning your staff's priorities is worth the cost of admission.

Luke Corley is the IT Manager for Breazeale Sachse & Wilson LLP. He has worked in the legal IT arena for more than 11 years, assisting attorneys and clients all over the world with a wide variety of IT projects, issues and disaster recovery.

Game-changing insights in IT are few and far between. Rather than challenge the status quo, too many IT leaders are content with patching outdated software and performing tedious maintenance work for on-premise systems simply because it's what has been historically expected. This type of environment rarely produces true corporate innovation, as the IT department is challenged with being thought of as crucial to the business only when things go awry. We changed that at Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson LLP (BSW) a couple of years ago by, if you can believe it, giving ourselves less work. Let me explain.

BSW is a corporate defense law firm that was founded in 1928. We have approximately 160 users spread across our offices in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Covington, LA. IT is absolutely critical to the organization ' everything from the documents created, the phone calls made, court filings, litigation support, accounting, and even the security system, is managed by IT. It's a wide-ranging, fast-paced job that keeps my staff and me on our toes as we address everyday challenges while strategizing for a leaner, more efficient operation.

e-Mail in particular is an important part of BSW's day-to-day operations. To put it plainly, if e-mail is offline, we're in a lot of trouble. We cannot afford any downtime, as BSW employees are constantly working on a large number of high-profile cases requiring constant collaboration with clients and opposing counsel. e-Mail has evolved over the years from a simple messaging tool into not only our primary method of communication with the outside world, but also the preferred method for document delivery for many of our clients. In today's world, legal cases can be won or lost by the information contained within a single e-mail. e-Mail is our lifeblood and a critical part of the corporate IT infrastructure.

Dealing with Disaster

My perspective on e-mail had been one of necessity. It was necessary to continually maintain cumbersome appliances on-site. It was necessary to invest large sums of money into the latest and greatest security products to keep viruses, spam and phishing attacks away from users. It was necessary to back up all of our e-mail on tape (a sound enough practice to preserve information, but not one that is conducive to finding information quickly). These were my realities and it lead to an unsteady relationship between my team and the BSW e-mail infrastructure as each appliance and software product presented its own challenges. Despite all of the staff's hard work, the amount of time and effort that went into keeping the e-mail system up and running was surpassing the performance of our system.

The initial trouble when looking for a solution to the firm's problem came from its vastness; in order to fix my e-mail problem, I needed to find a better way to solve the ingrained, eternal IT problems of expensive equipment creating a complex, unwieldy infrastructure. It was this challenge that drew me to the cloud. I did my homework on cloud computing and it appeared to be the answer to my needs. BSW's IT staff would no longer need to tend to temperamental on-site appliances, the vendor would handle all software upgrades, and we could manage everything from a Web portal. The service offerings that have come about in the past four to five years have finally given us alternatives to traditional anti-spam, anti-virus, and retention appliances. I came to view the cloud as a natural IT evolution.

What solidified this line of thinking was Hurricane Katrina. It is commonly held that if your organization's operations go down for more than 48 hours, you're likely not going to reopen. It seems callous to think of the vitality of a business in the wake of an almost apocalyptic disaster, but that is the corporate environment in which we live. If you go down for a hurricane or a disaster and you're not on the grid so that your clients and employees can communicate, the clock is ticking.

Our duty to serve our clients left us with only one option: We ended up going into New Orleans under armed guard, and it's a memory that I'll always carry with me. I went with a few staff members past the devastation to fetch our e-mail servers so employees from New Orleans could have access to those critical e-mails, documents and other information necessary to service our clients. Luckily for us, it was a happy ending. However, the incident revealed just how dependent we were on our e-mail system being online at all times. In a cloud environment, these critical e-mails with document attachments would have been safely stored away in no danger of being lost and, in fact, would have been accessible to anyone with a Web browser. The last straw took place when an appliance malfunction caused delays in e-mail delivery. It was time to find a way to break the cycle. My decision was made: I had to bring BSW's e-mail to the cloud.

Mimecast Fits Needs

After reviewing several different vendors, we settled on Mimecast because it had everything that BSW needed, plus some things we had not even thought of when we started our search. The company's Unified Email Management (UEM) solution was unique not only in the wide breadth of its offerings, but also the simplicity of its value. No other vendor was able to offer anti-spam, anti-virus, e-mail continuity, archiving and record retention functionality for a predictable yearly fee. Mimecast seemed to have the tools that most specifically cater to the needs of the legal environment. Anyone having to deal with e-discovery requests within their organizations would benefit from the Litigation Hold and e-Discovery modules within the Mimecast platform.

Getting started with Mimecast was as easy a process as I have ever encountered. The majority of Mimecast's offerings could be implemented with just a few changes to our MX records. Within 48 hours, we were up and running on the Mimecast platform ' and immediately started reaping the benefits.

Our primary concern, of course, was business continuity. Mimecast UEM removes our reliance on a physical location for e-mail management. e-Mail is continually routed through Mimecast's multi-tenant global infrastructure so there is never any downtime.

Another great feature was Mimecast's high-level of integration with Microsoft Exchange. Mimecast enables employees to work within the familiar Outlook interface, thus reducing the amount of training time. This is absolutely critical because the fastest way to receive a large number of help tickets is to replace employee-facing legacy systems with solutions that require users to alter their workflows. It is said that the best-laid plans of IT often fall at the hands of policies or technologies that “interfere” with employee productivity, and we had no interest in doing that. After all, technology should compliment whatever business it serves, not overshadow it. Mimecast users do not become overwhelmed with learning a new e-mail system that is so critical to their day-to-day lives. I look forward to exploring the more advanced features that the Exchange integration offers as we finalize our e-mail migration to that platform this year.

Business Advantages

Aside from functionality, partnering with a cloud vendor provided my team with a significant number of business advantages. IT complexity was a critical issue for BSW as we had to maintain not only our actual e-mail servers, but also the various appliances that were involved in the mail flow. This involved a rotating list of manual IT tasks, such as software patches, firmware updates, the restoration of deleted e-mails, creating backup files for critical business data and searching e-mail archives for information requested by an employee. These tasks were a huge time sink for my IT staff and prevented them from working on larger, more strategic projects. It was a no-win situation because these chores, though menial, could not be ignored. Additionally, if there was any problem with our e-mail delivery, we would have to check multiple points to determine the cause, which served only to delay a resolution. Cloud computing simplifies BSW's IT infrastructure and saves department staff from having to devote precious time to areas that are now handled by Mimecast.

Consistent pricing is also a major benefit of cloud computing solutions. Gone are the days where my department's budget was in a state of constant flux due to the disposition of any single piece of hardware or software. If a piece of hardware went down, there was no option but to replace it, making budgeting difficult, if not impossible. Now, I simply pay the yearly fee and reap the benefits without having to worry about inopportune expenses.

Conclusion

If you're looking to test the cloud waters, e-mail is an excellent place to start. If your IT infrastructure is anything like BSW's used to be, eliminating complexity, adding an additional layer of “always-on” business continuity, and realigning your staff's priorities is worth the cost of admission.

Luke Corley is the IT Manager for Breazeale Sachse & Wilson LLP. He has worked in the legal IT arena for more than 11 years, assisting attorneys and clients all over the world with a wide variety of IT projects, issues and disaster recovery.