International law firm
Norton Rose
has moved its disaster recovery centre from central London to
Uxbridge following London's bomb attacks.
The law firm is also seeking ISO 27001 accreditation for
security, which carries stringent tests for client data and
employee security. Both initiatives will help Norton Rose
differentiate itself among its competitors.
The business continuity plan has also been driven by the
City-based law firm's experience of being a bomb victim twice over.
In April 1992 it had to suspend operations when an IRA car bomb was
detonated in London's financial district, and in 1993 it was hit
when an IRA lorry bomb exploded in the Bishopsgate area.
Norton Rose's head of IT, Jeff Roberts, said that the business
survived both IRA bombs in part because it was not as dependent on
IT then as it is today.
In October 2006, Norton Rose commissioned BT to set up and run
the new £5m datacentre in Uxbridge, which is accessible to approved
Norton Rose IT staff.
Norton Rose tested the new centre, which houses 100 servers
holding 50Tbytes of data, for two weeks. It found the centre could
be fully functional within five hours.
BT is helping to develop an information lifecycle management
strategy for the law firm, which categorises data into "active"
data, which is stored on more expensive media, and "inactive" data,
which is stored on less expensive media.
Malcolm Todd, head of systems delivery at Norton Rose, said the
firm was also using a range of software products from Attachmate
division NetIQ to help achieve ISO security accreditation. These
include security incident and event management software to address
faults, often automatically, before they impact business users.
"Lawyers today need IT systems to do their work. If our systems
are not available, our lawyers cannot prepare cases or bill their
time, so there is a direct correlation between billings and system
availability," said Todd.
Related article:
BT to open £17m
datacentre to host high-end enterprise services
Stuart King’s risk management blog
Dealing with
the operational challenges of information security and risk
management
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