Ward Hadaway
“The combined saving on data management time, backup speeds and reduction on our data center footprint has been beyond what we expected.”
Established in 1988, Ward Hadaway is one of the largest law firms in the North of England, with 93 partners, almost 500 staff and offices in Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester.
Overview
Ward Hadaway’s IT team is responsible for implementing the four main objectives of the company’s IT strategy; improve IT infrastructure; increase efficiency; maintain and improve security and compliance and cloud migration.
Director of IT and Facilities Jonny Smith explains:
“We currently and historically have always relied on on-premise infrastructure. However, we are very aware that cloud services are becoming more and more popular, cost-effective and easy to manage.”
Ward Hadaway has approximately 150 servers, of which 98% are VMs and the remaining 2% are physical. Together, they store 25 to 30TB of data.
They previously had an in-house solution with replication to another site that had become expensive and time-consuming to manage, unreliable and no longer fit for purpose. The shortcomings of the old system were placing a big burden on the infrastructure team and raising concerns about the viability of the backups and the speed and effectiveness of replication. Meeting the firm’s RTO/RPO became increasingly difficult. The older, lower specification hardware also meant that these systems would perform significantly worse than the live infrastructure if they had to fall back to them.
Rubrik as a Service
Assured’s fully managed solution for backup, archive, disaster recovery and replication has made Ward Hadaway’s IT function more efficient removing the burden of managing DR tests from their IT team giving them the confidence that they can recover their data in its entirety.
They have 3 different locations in Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle where the majority of their data resides. They now have a Rubrik cluster on-premise, which backs up everything locally inside their network, encrypts it, compresses it and, most importantly, stores it on an immutable platform. Their data is then sent across the internet, incrementally, to the Rubrik cluster in Assured’s primary UK data center meaning it can be recovered more quickly.
As part of the solution, Assured monitors Ward Hadaway’s backups 24/7 reporting on and fixing any issues, ensuring there is always a clean copy of their backups.