Henry Davis York to save $450k with backup system

Sydney-based law firm Henry Davis York (HDY) has forecast savings of $450,000 over the next four years following the introduction of a new backup system.

The amount of data managed by the IT department had increased 20 per cent year on year and it was now managing over 30 terabytes of data. For example, every email that gets sent to a client is stored for 30 years by HDY.

In addition, if a partner at the law firm accidentally deleted important files it could take between two to five days to restore the information.

HDY IT operations manager Alex Clonaris told CIO Australia that it selected an Actifio backup system in 2013.

“With Actifio, because we have de-duplication, we can now do a restore within 30 minutes.

“Essentially the savings [of $450,000] will come from retiring the existing infrastructure that we had in place to do the backup and recovery. These appliances were nearing end of lease so we had additional maintenance to consider. We also had to factor in additional storage,” he said.

Another benefit has been the acceleration of email exchange results, essential for law firms as emails count as legal documents.

HDY COO Kelvin O’Connor said that if it continued to invest in the old technology, it would have been faced with continual upgrades.

“Keeping the system operating properly means a good backup solution is part of that resilience.”

The law firm selected a physical backup system due to concerns about data hosted in the cloud.

“We aren’t discounting it [the cloud] but we aren’t looking at it actively. There are data sovereignty and security issues. Having said that, it’s probably a wave we can’t resist in the future. We’re keeping an open mind at the moment,” O’Connor said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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