Customer suCCess

Holland & Knight LLP making the Case with Data Protection and endpoint security solutions from symantec

A leading international law firm, Holland & Knight LLP depends on information, and the firm depends on Symantec to help protect and secure that data while simplifying administration. A comprehensive data protection solution using Symantec NetBackup™ and Symantec NetBackup PureDisk™ is projected to save $100,000 annually in tape costs. The firm is also saving $40,000 annually by avoiding the need for additional IT staff to manage security.

Dispersed Workforce unified by Infrastructure

Holland & Knight LLP is one of the world’s largest law firms, with 25 offices in the United States, Mexico, the Middle East, and Far East. Despite this dispersed workforce, the firm operates as a single entity, giving clients access to a full range of expertise represented by a staff of 1,100 at-torneys and 1,000 other professionals. Supporting this vision requires sophisticated information technology and a unified, flexible infrastructure.

The responsibility for managing that infrastructure falls on the shoulders of Clint VanWinkle, IT Networks & Operations Manager. “Making sure that information is both secure and available to our users is what our team is all about. We have to defend against malicious code—viruses, worms, Trojan horses—any of which could seriously compromise our information. We have to provide the data needed to certify compliance with regulations, such as HIPAA and SB 1386. Our primary data center is located in Hurricane Alley, so ensuring business continuity is paramount.”

Holland & Knight’s infrastructure revolves around its major data center near Tampa, Florida, which provides centralized services to the firm’s branch offices for email, Web services, accounting, and document management. A second smaller site in Colorado functions primarily as a disaster recov-ery site.

Holland & Knight’s attorneys and other professionals rely on electronic communications for much of their work, and email and electronic documents have become business-critical records. The firm has an extensive collection of legal documents, the vast majority of which are stored electroni-cally using iManage WorkSite software. Holland & Knight catalogs, organizes, and tracks changes in more than 15 million documents contained within the firm’s library. Together, Holland & Knight’s email, legal documents, and other organizational information add up to more than 100 terabytes of data.

orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe

Website: www.hklaw.com

Industry: Legal

Headquarters: Tampa, Florida

employees: 2,100

symANteC soLutIoNs Data Protection

Endpoint Security

Client Management

Security Management

Why symantec?

· Increased efficiencies and fast payback in data protection and security

· Unique ability to quickly back up and recover email messages and virtual servers

· Over $200,000 in realized and projected annual savings

Customer suCCess HoLLAND & KNIGHt LLP

optimizing Backup on Virtual machines

To protect its data, Holland & Knight replaced its CA ARCserve Backup system with Symantec Backup Exec™ in 1995. Today, the firm relies on NetBackup and has deployed a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strategy. “Even-tually, our goal is to eliminate tape com-pletely,” VanWinkle explains.

“What makes NetBackup unique, compared to the competition,” VanWinkle says, “is its one-pass backup of an entire virtual machine and its ability to recover individual files.” Since NetBackup for VMware integrates with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), the entire VMware ESX server can be backed up in one pass while allowing for granular recov-ery of a single file. “If an attorney acciden-tally deletes a file that was on a file server, we can restore that file in minutes, not the hours other solutions require—they’d make us restore the entire virtual machine first,” VanWinkle says.

Centralizing and Deduplicating Backup Data

Holland & Knight uses a combination of NetBackup and NetBackup PureDisk to fa-cilitate backup of data at its 20 branch of-fices. Before NetBackup PureDisk was de-ployed, all data was backed up to tapes, and the tapes were sent to an offsite location for long-term retention. This approach required handling of tapes at every branch office, making for an extremely cumbersome and inefficient process.

With the introduction of NetBackup PureDisk deduplication technology, Holland & Knight was able to integrate its branch offices into the firm’s disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strat-egy, eliminating the need for tape at those offices.

All NetBackup backups at each of the branch offices are now written to a local instance of the NetBackup PureDisk storage pool using the PureDisk Deduplication Option (PDDO) for NetBackup. All file and application data is retained locally for 14 days for fast, reliable recovery. For data retention beyond the 14-day period, all branch office data is repli-

cated back to a central data center hosted in Tampa. Some of the data is written to tape in the Tampa data center for longer term reten-tion and is encrypted by NetBackup before being written to tape.

As a longer-term strategy, Holland & Knight plans to leverage NetBackup and NetBackup PureDisk deduplication technology to back up its branch office data in the western U.S. to a new data center that is expected to be

soLutIoNs At A GLANCe

Key Challenges

• Provide centralized, streamlined backups for physical and virtual servers

• Eliminate backup tapes from remote practice offices

• Enhance endpoint protection and enterprise security

• Recover individual files without restoring entire databases or virtual machines

• Reduce IT overhead

symantec Products

• Symantec NetBackup™

– NetBackup for VMware

• Symantec NetBackup PureDisk™

– PureDisk Deduplication Option for NetBackup

• Symantec™ Endpoint Protection

symantec services

• Symantec DeepSight™ Alert Services

• Symantec Essential Support Services

technology environment

• Server platform: About 500 mostly HP ProLiant servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003; 250 VMware ESX servers

• Applications: iManage document management, Microsoft Office 2003

• Databases: Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005

• Storage:, HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) 2012i, Hitachi Universal Storage Platform (USP) V SAN, Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2100

• Tape library: Sun StorageTek SL500

BusINess resuLts AND teCHNICAL BeNeFIts

operational efficiency

• 96% faster backups using NetBackup streaming technology

• 83% faster restores for electronic documents

• 15% reduction in time spent by security team researching threats because of customized, actionable early-warning security alerts

Cost savings

• $40,000 annual savings by eliminating additional IT security staff

• Projected $100,000 annual savings from reduced tape costs

• $90,000 annual savings on time spent troubleshooting PCs by reimaging them instead

“Our early experience is that

NetBackup PureDisk deduplication

is reducing the volume of backup

data by 30 to 60 percent—and up

to 90 percent on some machines.”Brian LangloisIT Storage EngineerHolland & Knight LLP

Customer suCCess HoLLAND & KNIGHt LLP

launched in Denver, Colorado. The Tampa and Denver data centers will eventually rep-licate data to each other using the NetBackup and NetBackup PureDisk deduplication tech-nologies, allowing the firm to create a very robust data protection and disaster recovery strategy.

“Our early experience is that NetBackup PureDisk deduplication is reducing the vol-ume of backup data by 30 to 60 percent—and up to 90 percent on some machines,” Brian Langlois, IT Storage Engineer, Holland & Knight, reports.

“This obviously reduces the volume of data that eventually goes to tape. Overall, the new backup architecture reduces our tape use and should save us about $100,000 a year in tape and shipping costs. VanWinkle says.

robust security at the endpoint

On the security front, Holland & Knight relies on Symantec™ Endpoint Protection, which was chosen in 2000 in a competitive evalua-tion that included McAfee, Inc., and Trend Micro, Inc. There has been no significant disruption from malicious code to date. Hol-land & Knight chose Endpoint Protection because it provided the most effective and easiest to manage solution. The current ver-sion combines antivirus, antispyware, fire-wall, intrusion prevention, and device and application control technologies on end-points with a single agent. And it allows IT staff to configure, monitor, and update the firm’s endpoint protection from a single cen-tralized console.

As a result, the solution is saving Holland & Knight $40,000 annually by eliminating the need for additional IT staff to manage secu-rity. In particular, the centralized administra-tion features of Endpoint Protection are saving the IT group 40 hours per week. Ad-ditionally, the device control feature of Endpoint Protection will enable the firm to enforce customized policies on the use of

USB devices. “We’re evaluating this in a pilot program,” VanWinkle says. “We will be lock-ing down some USB ports so that the only usable device will be a corporate thumb drive that is encrypted to protect our data.”

early threat Alerts for Proactive Protection

To establish a more proactive approach for security threats, Holland & Knight relies on Symantec DeepSight™ Alert Services. “With DeepSight Alert Services, I can specify ex-actly which platforms I want to monitor,” explains Rick Bywalski, Security Analyst, Hol-land & Knight. “It sends us just the vulnera-bility information that’s relevant to our envi-ronment. We previously spent as much as 15 percent of a team member’s time research-ing new and potential threats. Thanks to the rapid delivery of the DeepSight personalized and actionable security information, Holland & Knight is now better positioned to dedicate more time on supporting the needs of its in-ternal clients and developing core business initiatives.”

The security team also uses DeepSight to help identify needed security patches, and not just in the company’s computing environ-ment. For example, the team once received an alert notice about a security vulnerability with the company’s phone system using DeepSight Alert Services.

the right Kind of support Builds the Business

For technical support, Holland & Knight calls on the 24×7 availability of Symantec Essen-tial Support Services. “With challenges from viruses and other issues, we use Symantec support often,” VanWinkle says. “It’s almost like having a security expert on retainer. Or as we are trying to deploy a new technology, it makes an expert available that can validate that we’re doing things appropriately.”

The firm considers Symantec a key technol-ogy partner. “What we do with Symantec is business-critical,” VanWinkle sums up. “We needed to secure our environment and pro-vide for business continuity. And Symantec helps us achieve those requirements.

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. Symantec, the Symantec logo, Backup Exec, DeepSight, NetBackup, and PureDisk are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

“Overall, the new backup architecture

reduces our tape use and should

save us about $100,000 a year

in tape and shipping costs.”Clint VanwinkleIT Operations ManagerHolland & Knight LLP

“What makes NetBackup unique,

compared to the competition, is

its one-pass backup of an entire

virtual machine and its ability

to recover individual files.”Clint VanwinkleIT Operations ManagerHolland & Knight LLP