Case study: Denton Wilde Sapte

Pamment: content management should be owned by the people in the business

With 600 lawyers and a global network of 12 offices, law firm Denton Wilde Sapte offers a full range of commercial legal services, including dispute resolution, mergers and acquisitions.

IT director Neil Pamment says the rationale of his department is about getting the right information, at the right time, in the right format, at the right cost to the people who need it.

“People are so wrapped up in the technical whizz-bangs that they forget that IT is really all about information delivery,” he says.

With increasingly large volumes of data being generated, Pamment wanted a way of managing it that was secure while ensuring the information remained readily accessible.

“As a law firm, our documents are like products for other businesses,” he says. “So we started the management process by looking for a secure and efficient backup and retrieval method.”

Traditional methods of tape backup took too much time, and as a storage medium tape is ineffectual at speedy information retrieval.

“Our data had to be available for rapid retrieval in case of disaster recovery and to assure business continuity at all times,” says Pamment. “But it also had to be secure.”

Denton Wilde Sapte decided to use a combination of managed services from data specialist InTechnology. The information lifecycle management service is used for archiving documents which remain accessible and can be brought back online in seconds, while the VBak service offered the rapid backup, offsite storage and fast restores needed to meet the information management disaster recovery and business continuity requirements.

“We have rules for how long we keep information from a legal perspective,” says Pamment. “For example, any email attachments older than 35 days are now automatically archived, but they can be retrieved in seconds if required. Unstructured data is a lot harder to manage, so we have to apply rules and put a lot more processes and procedures around that information.”

Pamment and his team are now able to turn their attention to the wider issues of information management.

“Content management is not an IT matter, it should be owned by the people in the business, and that is where it should be actively managed,” says Pamment. “I want to reinforce the idea that IT is a service surrounding the delivery of information. The information itself is an asset of the business, not the IT department.”