Patterson Palmer

Rock-Solid Data Protection, Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

Customer Challenge:
Protecting the integrity of its accounting data

“For the cost of purchasing tape drives and tapes each year,
the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service provides me
with an easy and automatic way to protect my data."
Paul Miller, Network Systems Analyst, Patterson Palmer

Legal Industry Goes Paperless
Stacks upon stacks of paper. Rows of file cabinets filled to the brim. Workers with briefcases stuffed full of documents. This is the ubiquitous image we have of law firms. But the reality is that most law firms these days don’t look like this. While they do still rely on paper documents to some extent, many of the piles of paper have been replaced with PCs, electronic files and servers, and the attorneys carry briefcases that hold their laptops.

Yes, law firms have entered the digital age, along with thousands of other businesses worldwide. And while it’s certainly far more efficient to store important legal documents on the company server where they are easily accessible throughout the firm, this migration to electronic data brings with it a new host of problems. Computers and servers are not infallible and they do break down. That’s why it’s important for any law firm to have a robust data protection plan to guard itself against disaster.

The Argument for Online Backup and Recovery
Patterson Palmer, one of the largest law firms in Atlantic Canada, knows the importance of its electronic data and the need to stringently protect it. Patterson Palmer’s office in Halifax, Nova Scotia has 140 employees, 55 of whom are lawyers. These lawyers bill clients for their services each and every day, and that accounting information is all stored on the company server along with key client and case data. If anything were to happen to any of this data, it would be catastrophic for the company.

Up until mid-2002, Patterson Palmer backed up all of its files to tape on a nightly basis. However, the law firm occasionally encountered errors with this method of data protection and the IT staff wondered if it would backup and restore properly when it counted most.

Patterson Palmer wanted a data protection method that was more reliable than tape and easier to implement. In addition, Canadian regulations require law firms to store their data offsite. Patterson Palmer needed a way to meet regulatory needs while also improving data protection in a cost- and resource-effective way.

The firm conducted a review of the data protection products and services on the market and chose the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service™.

LiveVault Protects Data and Guarantees Restores
“For the cost of purchasing tape drives and tapes each year, the LiveVault® Online Backup and Recovery Service™ provides me with an easy and automatic way to protect my data,” said Paul Miller, network systems analyst of Patterson Palmer.

“The LiveVault service goes far beyond tape-based backup
by continuously backing up my data and automatically getting
it offsite. Not only that, but the service is error-free and
LiveVault guarantees the recovery of my data.”

LiveVault works by automatically and continuously backing up business server data via an Internet connection and storing it in a secure offsite facility, where it is available for immediate recovery in the event of a system failure, virus, human error or other disaster. By operating on a continuous basis, Patterson Palmer, in the event of a disaster, can recover data up to the minute of the data-loss event, rather than up to the last time someone performed a tape backup. This level of service is invaluable when dealing with constantly changing data, such as billing information.

“Our accounting department asked us to restore some critical data, so I logged on to LiveVault and simply clicked on the data I wanted to restore,” said Miller. “The whole process took just minutes, far less time than going to the safety deposit box at the bank to retrieve the tape backup from the night before.”

The LiveVault service is designed for customers, such as Patterson Palmer, whose servers reside outside of major data centers. These customers are often mid-sized businesses that have primarily relied on in-house tape backups to keep their data safe. Industry 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 assures that companies will return to the state of their business prior to a data-loss event.

“The price of LiveVault is small compared to the cost of data loss,”
said Miller. “Even losing just a day’s worth of data would cost me more than the price of LiveVault for a full year. The service is invaluable.”