Fasken Martineau selects Oncore IT

With over 770 lawyers in nine offices across Europe, Canada and Africa, Fasken Martineau has particular expertise in mining, life sciences, banking and finance, energy and infrastructure and public-private partnerships.

As a SRA[1] regulated business, Fasken Martineau has to have a thorough approach to backing up all its client data, applications, operating systems and data base files to meet compliance guidance and requirements.

The business used to have a fully managed tape service in place with a third party firm who collected its DLT tapes each day, provided offsite storage and returned them as required.

John Maclennan, Fasken Martineau’s IT manager, says, “There weren’t any problems with this in itself, but I’ve always felt that we could handle the backup process much better to free up time and make the whole process much faster and more efficient.”

Every morning a member of staff in the IT department would have to check the overnight backup had completed, eject the tape, put in a case, meet a driver, with the opportunity for scheduled collections to be missed – and the whole cycle then thrown out of sync – very likely if some-one was off work sick or late because of traffic or train hold ups.

Maclennan says, “One of my first priorities when I took over leadership of the London IT function was to change this unnecessarily stressful manual process and embrace the cloud to automate backup, especially as the technology has matured and storage costs have come down such that it’s actually comparable in price with our old [tape] approach.”

Agentless Asigra cloud backup technology makes managing data easy
Fasken Martineau reviewed various options and selected Oncore IT as its cloud backup partner given it adopts a partnership, consultative and responsive approach to working with clients. Under the terms of the agreement, Oncore IT is providing up to 3 TB of data storage.

Maclennan explains, “I liked what I saw with Asigra. It does what it says on the tin. It’s easy to use and no bells and whistles to learn. Oncore IT has been responsive, open and forthright and the deployment straightforward.”

A specific secure Fasken Martineau ‘vault’ has been created on Oncore IT’s new Hitachi Data Systems storage platform with data then loaded into it. To establish the local, daily data updates, just one Asigra monitoring client – a DS Agent – was installed at Fasken Martineau’s London office to collect data from its servers. This massively simplifies rollout and contrasts with other solutions whic h require monitoring agents on each and every server. Data is held in Oncore IT’s London datacentre and replicated to its offshore facility in Amsterdam for resilience.

Paul Cook, Oncore IT’s sales and marketing director, says, “Fasken Martineau estimates that it is saving at least an hour a day by not managing manual tape backups which frees its IT team to focus on more productive activities such as new project initiatives and providing helpdesk support not wasting time on important but time consuming process.”

Fasken Martineau has found that it is now backing up more data than before as the whole procedure is so thorough such that it has complete confidence that all its crucial commercial information is fully available and easy to restore should an event happen. And this has already happened where one PC got infected with a virus and a network drive then corrupted. The business was able to quickly isolate the problem with a full recovery completed in a few hours.

Maclennan concludes, “What’s interesting about this project is that it’s our first taste of deploying a cloud solution. You hear lots of chatter about the benefits of the cloud. In our case it has been very much proven to work and it’s a much better way of dealing with our inevitable backup requirements.”