The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/448505
PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA Despite the success of our practice, our IT infrastructure could no longer meet our business demands for scalability and information services diversification. We needed to upgrade our network to one that delivered better performance, supporting high-bandwidth and quality-of-service- dependent applications, such as client collaboration sessions and video depositions. GROWTH DRIVES CHANGE Like many firms in our industry, we have had to accommodate mergers, creating new practices and integrating new offices. These changes have required us to adapt our network topography rapidly to give our expanded firm the ability to collaborate using unified communication tools and the ability to share firm and client information securely. MLA chose Masergy as the cloud services company for our fully managed global networking and unified communications. This choice enabled us to roll out private managed connectivity between all our offices. In addition to end-to-end connectivity, we also utilize dynamic bandwidth controls and other network management tools. The upgrade helps us to ensure immediate application availability and performance levels without the need to contact our provider, file a bandwidth increase request and wait for our service order to be fulfilled. We can "dial" bandwidth up or down on demand as our business needs require. MANAGED SERVICES AT MLA The new IT infrastructure supporting our firm includes: • Secure, scalable, private network services provided by a single company that manages our end-to-end global network. These network management services reduce the time staff spend monitoring and troubleshooting issues. • Software-defined network control, which enables customized support for video collaboration and depositions by adjusting bandwidth on demand — from any Internet-connected device. • Real-time analytics with performance metrics designed to enhance our business planning capabilities. These technologies work in tandem to ensure all users can access all of the firm's information resources, decision support tools and unified communications services, regardless of location. Our network and management services have exceeded our expectations. We now have an agile and flexible IT infrastructure that enables us to respond quickly to ever-changing business demands and new methods of collaboration. 24 A Managed Services IT Infrastructure CASE STUDIES The upgrade helps us ensure immediate application availability and performance levels without the need to contact our provider. About the Author Patrick Tisdale is the CIO at McKenna Long & Aldridge. He is responsible for providing leadership to the firm's information technology, knowledge management, library and information resources, and practices support. Contact Patrick at ptisdale@mckennalong.com. McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP (MLA) is an international law firm with 500 attorneys and public policy advisors in 15 offices and 13 markets. Our firm is positioned at the intersection of law, business and government, representing clients across a diverse range of industries.