Farrell Fritz, P.C.

Defending Itself Against Data Loss

Business:
Law firm with three offices on Long Island, N.Y. and 200 employees

Customer Challenge:
To secure its three regional offices against data loss and to ensure business continuity between its offices in the event of a disaster.

"The service is easy to install, requires no IT maintenance and it is cost-effective—plus we know that our information can always be recovered." Stan Ercolano, Director of Information Technology, Farrell Fritz

Farrell Fritz, Leading Long Island Law Firm
Document control and management is a lawyer's lifeline. Losing them is their worst nightmare. Farrell Fritz, P.C., one of Long Island's largest and most respected law firms, knows that losing corporate data is a scenario that is not far-fetched. Data-loss events—from an accidental keystroke to a fire or flood—ruin businesses' electronic data every day. Farrell Fritz didn't want to be left exposed if such a disaster happened to them.

As with any other law firm, Farrell Fritz has vital data stored on its servers, such as legal documents, e-mail and file attachments. If anything were to happen to this data, it would take hours or days for Farrell Fritz to recreate it.

A Call to Action
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 served as a wake-up call to Farrell Fritz, and the firm concluded that its disaster recovery plans were inadequate. Farrell Fritz's headquarters in Uniondale, N.Y. and satellite offices in Melville, N.Y. backed up their data to tape every night, then sent them to an offsite storage facility the next day. However, this level of backup was insufficient, because in the event of a disaster or other data-loss event, not only could the firm permanently lose up to two days worth of data, but it would also take it 24-36 hours to retrieve the data on tape since it was stored offsite at least 20 miles away from the company's headquarters.

"In our industry, 36 hours without our mission-critical data would be fatal," said Stan Ercolano, director of information technology of Farrell Fritz. "It would seriously damage our reputation and compromise our ability to effectively do our jobs."

Satellite Offices at Risk
To complicate matters, at Farrell Fritz's smallest satellite office in Bridgehampton, N.Y., the data protection and disaster recovery plan was even less stringent than at its headquarters. Ercolano says a secretary at the office would back up the server data to her desktop PC, which stayed in the office. In the event of a physical disaster or theft, all of that information would be permanently lost. Farrell Fritz knew it needed to reconsider the way it protected its data.

"We surveyed the attorneys in our office and asked them how much data loss they considered acceptable," said Ercolano. "Forty-three percent indicated that absolutely zero permanent data loss could be tolerated, and another 10 percent could only accept data loss within the last 24 hours."

LiveVault Selected for Ease-of-Restore
Based on this information, Ercolano concluded that not only was Farrell Fritz's data protection plan very risky, but that he had to find a new solution that would back up the firm's data on a continuous basis and guarantee that the employees could recover the data when they needed it. Ercolano also wanted a data protection plan that would standardize the backup and disaster recovery process across Farrell Fritz's three locations, and would not put the data at its smallest office at extreme risk.

Farrell Fritz evaluated several backup and disaster recovery options, and ultimately decided on the LiveVault® Online Backup & Recovery Service, purchased through Compaq (now HP). LiveVault works by automatically and continuously backing up business server data via a secure Internet connection and storing it in an offsite facility, where it is available for immediate recovery in the event of a system failure, virus, human error or other instance when disaster recovery is necessary.

The LiveVault service is designed for customers, such as Farrell Fritz, whose servers reside outside of major data centers—such as enterprise remote or branch offices, or mid-sized businesses—and who have primarily relied on in-house tape backups to keep their data safe. Analysts estimate nearly 50 percent of tape-based backups for these distributed servers fail to fully recover, which exposes these businesses to significant risk. Conversely, LiveVault guarantees recovery of all business-critical data and lets companies return to the state of their business prior to a data-loss event.

"The LiveVault Online Backup & Recovery Service met all of our criteria," said Ercolano. "It continuously saves all changes to an offsite vault, so we can recover all of our information up to the minute of a disaster. The service is easy to install, requires no IT maintenance, and it is cost-effective—plus we know that our information can always be recovered. We also know that we can trust LiveVault with our information, given its impressive partnerships with HP and Iron Mountain."

Farrell Fritz is now able to restore all of its data at the click of a button with LiveVault's easy-to-use Web-based interface. Thus far, the law firm has performed more than 100 restores using LiveVault. Ercolano says the restore capability is used all the time.

"The great thing about this service is that it's like a 'Restore For Dummies,'" said Ercolano. "The service is that easy. With LiveVault, I am confident that no matter what happens to our servers, our electronic data will always be fully recoverable, in just moments."