Case study: Cloud Failover
International law firm achieves automatic ISP failover to maintain constant connectivity to their IT resources.
Morris, Manning & Martin LLP is a full-service law firm with 200 lawyers and six offices worldwide. Founded in 1976, attorneys at MMM take pride in serving their clients as counsel, advisors, and even as friends. The focus of the firm is on the satisfaction of their clients. They consider their clients’ successes as the only true measure of the company’s success. The law firm has received numerous local and national awards for their work. They are also involved in many charitable causes as well as the development of financial technology.
“Email is the lifeblood of any law firm. If our attorneys, partners and staff are unable to access email 24×7, we can’t respond to our clients’ needs in a timely fashion.”
– Jimmy Mullis, CIO/IT Director
The Challenge
In today’s connected world, it’s essential to maintain constant access to the IT resources that support us. We all know how frustrating it can be to lose an internet connection right in the middle of some important activity. That’s what Morris, Manning, and Martin personnel were facing. Attorneys at MMM are often on the road or otherwise away from the office. Unfortunately, they found that their internet links regularly failed them.
As a backup solution, the IT department had two internet services providers (ISPs) in place: Level3 and AT&T. But that wasn’t enough. They needed a seamless transition from one ISP to the other when the first one failed. Their attorneys didn’t need the hassle of re-establishing a connection through a different provider. Time is of the essence, and the interruption was unacceptable.
As Jimmy Mullis, CIO and IT Director at MMM points out, ISP reliability isn’t perfect. But that’s not always the Internet Service Provider’s fault. The “last mile” between the ISPs network access point and the customer site is the most vulnerable part.
The Solution
Morris, Manning, and Martin approached Total Uptime to help with managing inbound traffic routing to their applications. They needed to make their Microsoft Exchange, AirWatch Secure Email Gateway (SEG), VMWare View and corporate VPN more highly available for their attorneys. Without ready access to these resources, MMM attorneys simply can’t do their work. But Total Uptime had the answer.
“When one ISP has an issue with latency or packet loss or even a complete outage, it’s imperative that our internal applications remain available,” Jimmy told us. Now, with the Cloud Failover solution from Total Uptime, he says, “external access to our internal applications has increased significantly.” And he found it easy to use, reliable and cost effective.
The Total Uptime setup impressed the IT director. The innovation was in the way our implementation used a cloud-based network load balancer to solve their application availability challenges. And the solution also supported their Microsoft Exchange failover from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.
Another problem solved, and another customer satisfied. So what can Total Uptime do to improve your network availability?