A global law firm with over 575 attorneys across 15 offices, McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP sought to upgrade from their sluggish corporate network to a high-performance and secure network platform that would meet their needs for scalability, reliability and accessibility. McKenna Long & Aldridge required:
- Performance guarantees for collaborative applications used during client depositions
- Secure connections to highly-sensitive legal data and assets
- Reliable, future-proof technology that is simple to scale and manage
As a legal firm, the company conducts a significant amount of meetings and depositions. It was vitally important that these meetings go smoothly and that the technology never complicated the process. Access to complex legal documents over the network and business critical applications like voice and video needed to be extremely reliable.
Due to their anticipated growth, the firm sought an agile solution with fast deployment and real-time scalability. They sought a reliable partner who would fully-manage their network platform.
Solutions
After completing an extensive amount of research, McKenna Long & Aldridge chose Masergy’s Managed Cloud Networking with:
- Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) for secure managed connections to all offices
- Internet Plus access with ability to maintain a high quality of service (QoS)
- Cloud Remote Access for connecting employees to corporate assets from any web-enabled device
With these Managed Cloud Networking solutions, the firm could open new offices quicker than ever before. One of the unique advantages the solution provided the firm’s IT team was the ability to modify bandwidth and service planes for their corporate network in real-time.
“We are often setting up, moving or closing offices as we grow — it’s part of the constant repositioning we do to best serve our clients,” said Patrick Tisdale, CIO of McKenna, Long & Aldridge. “Masergy is much faster than its competitors in being able to respond to these changes in our business, implementing high quality communications services wherever we find our attorneys need to be.”
Furthermore, the company leveraged Masergy’s embedded cloud-based tools like Intelligent Network Analyst (INA) to monitor and analyze network traffic and application usage patterns. This provided them with predictive insights for strategic IT initiatives.
Business Benefits
McKenna Long & Aldridge’s transition to Masergy’s fully-managed cloud networking solution resulted in:
- Increased business agility – Locations were opened around the world with minimal IT intervention
- Improved productivity – Employees, regardless of where they were, all gained access to the same applications and the user experience was consistent for every office in the company.
“Masergy designed its network, management tools and client tools specifically for video, voice and very sensitive traffic,” said Tisdale. “We have more than tripled the number of video conferences we hold and they’re all very reliable.”
The ability for McKenna Long & Aldridge to dynamically scale bandwidth on the fly enabled the firm to pay only for the bandwidth that they needed and ensure that their business critical applications were highly available.
By partnering with Masergy, McKenna Long & Aldridge gained a scalable, reliable and flexible solution that helps them build and grow their business. McKenna Long & Aldridge found that Masergy had engineering expertise, innovative technology and proactive 24/7 support that went above and beyond the competition.
This article was originally posted “Law firm upgrades to the cloud” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
