Zert0 – BC/DR for law firms

BC/DR for law firms and their virtualized applications can be difficult to manage and even harder to secure. A typical law firm may have over 20-30 different applications, each consisting of multiple virtual machines (VMs) used by different teams of paid workers and business units. Each maintenance and recovery application can potentially use different BC/DR technologies that require specialized knowledge. This creates significant difficulties and the additional risk of not being able to successfully and quickly recover from disasters. A huge challenge facing law firms is securing BC/DR management with so many applications. Here is an example of some of the simple legal applications that require protection:

• Accounts and PMS applications such as SAP, Elite, Aderant, Tikit and SOS
• DMS applications such as iManage, OpenText and Sharepoint
• Case management applications such as LexisNexis, LawSoft, OpenText, Casebook, and MatterSphere
• Voice recording applications such as Bighand, WinScribe and DigiScribe
• CRM applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, TikitConnect, Lawsoft and Interaction
• Cost recovery apps like Copitrak, nQueue Billback, Chrome River, and Equitrak
• HR applications such as PeopleSoft, Northgate, Cascade, Sage and SelectHR
• With a huge number of different and complex legal applications, without an easy-to-use BC/DR enterprise-class solution that any employee could manage in just a few clicks; Law firms can be exposed to a significant risk of business downtime, data loss, and client trust, spending countless hours and days of IT staff working hours in an attempt to preserve various BC/DR solutions for multiple legal applications.

How Zerto Protects Legal Apps

Through the use of Zerto Virtual Replication Virtual Protection Group (VPG) technology, the virtual machines in which each legal application is represented are selected and placed in the VPG, allowing legal applications to be restored sequentially at the same point in time, significantly reducing the complexity of protecting legal environments, without the need to change production.

Zerto Virtual Replication enables per-VM-based continuous replication, delivering the fractional-second RPO needed by legal environments to minimize the loss of potentially critical legal data. By not using snapshots for replication, without degrading performance in protected virtual machines and applications that provide sources of payment, business units can continue to use applications at full performance with maximum data protection.

Log-based protection provides down to the seconds of recovery, which allows you to protect yourself from all kinds of disasters that can affect law firms and legal applications, from hardware failures to database corruption, malfunctions when updating applications, user errors or even cunning system viruses.

In addition to recovery, Zerto includes a remote backup feature to use replicated data for long-term archiving. Moving backup operations out of production means that daily backups, which slow down the production environment, will be eliminated.

Zerto Virtual Replication is fully integrated into the hypervisor, allowing easy BC/DR management on a per-VM and VPG basis. This significantly reduces the complexity and overhead of IT staff by configuring and maintaining replication in one easy-to-use interface, rather than managing multiple systems and maintaining multiple skill sets for working with other security solutions.

Non-impacted fault tolerance testing allows you to verify that multiple legal applications have successfully failed during business hours, within minutes, without closing running applications or completing replication. Therefore, the law firm during testing can continue to work as usual. Fault tolerance testing also allows each business unit to manage and perform its own disaster recovery tests to verify that one or more related legal applications are operating in a recovery scenario. This significantly reduces the burden on IT staff when testing disaster recovery, as it is implemented and accepted by end users and application owners.

Resume

The simplicity of Zerto Virtual Replication and support for any storage device, multiple hypervisors, hybrid and public clouds is a strategic advantage for any legal environment. Made on a software basis and installed within minutes, Zerto Virtual Replication also removes all complexity from BC/DR configuration, making it easily scalable for migration and disaster recovery projects as law firms expand with acquisitions and mergers of disparate infrastructures.

With support for VMware and Hyper-V, the same license can be used today to protect virtual machines in a VMware environment, then be used to migrate from VMware to Hyper-V and in the future protect virtual machines from Hyper-V to Hyper-V. Using one software solution, one interface, and one skill set for all potential BC/DR requirements that can be implemented today and in the future makes Zerto a strategic investment.