Data centre move helps continuity

Law firm's disaster recovery plans get boost with office move

Law firm Allen & Overy has signed managed services contracts worth £10m to provide disaster recovery assurances when it moves to new offices.

The company has signed a £5.5m five-year data centre hosting deal with Savvis and a £4.5m managed Cisco network deal to be operated by Fibrenet.

The firm wants to ensure that systems are resilient when it moves to a new head office in the City of London this year.

‘We decided we would move the data centre out so that if there is an attack in London that damages the building we could run our services remotely,’ said Dave Burwell, Allen & Overy chief information officer. ‘We also wanted high availability because legal business is often about deals being done through the night.

‘Most of our clients are financial institutions with a lot of time-critical transactional information.’