Law Firm Simmons & Simmons Deploys Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that the international law firm Simmons & Simmons has selected and deployed Riverbed WDS solutions across 20 offices in 13 countries. The deployment has enabled Simmons & Simmons to increase worker collaboration between offices and achieve IT consolidation. By using Riverbed, the law firm has seen its bandwidth capacity increase by 4.5 times and has achieved a 75% reduction in the global amount of data transferred over the network.

Simmons & Simmons has installed 21 Riverbed Steelhead appliances in offices across the globe, including London, Rome, Brussels, Frankfurt, Dubai, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi and Madeira. The law firm, which uses Cisco routers and switches in its data centres and office locations, chose Riverbed to enable it to consolidate its local systems into three data centre sites in London, Rotterdam and Hong Kong, and improve business resiliency. It also wanted to provide a more streamlined service for end users, offering faster application performance when using Microsoft Exchange, the Internet and Intranet, and the document management software Interwoven over the wide area network (WAN).

Simmons & Simmons is a world-class law firm with offices in 13 countries across the globe. It has over 2,000 staff worldwide, with a headquarters in London.

James Mackay, network and security manager at Simmons & Simmons, comments: “We brought in Riverbed as part of our global IT consolidation project. We needed to ensure that our office staff outside of the UK could continue to access their critical applications and data over the WAN once we had centralized our IT services into three regional data centers.  We had to ensure centralizing our IT services did not create longer application response times for users in our offices, but made things faster, so services to our clients could be improved.”

He continues: “Previously, in-country locations had been responsible for managing the local IT infrastructure and applications, which created regional silos that couldn’t always collaborate together as well as they should have. Consolidation means employees can now access all applications regardless of location through a standard desktop and lock down policy. From a network and security point of view, this is far easier to manage, whilst providing end-users with a consistent service.”

However, this application performance in a consolidated environment was only possible by implementing Riverbed. When Simmons & Simmons decided to consolidate its IT infrastructure, it realized early on that such a move would slow down the network, impacting staff productivity. The law firm looked at Cisco and Silver Peak to solve the problem, but neither fit its requirements. Riverbed was brought in based on its previous experience and tested by an independent third party. Positive results paved the way for a successful implementation.

“We were impressed with the ‘plug and go’ simplicity of the implementation and the ease of management with Riverbed. We were able to deploy the boxes before migration – everything was straightforward. It did what it said on the tin, that’s what I was looking for, and that’s what it did,” said Mackay.

Simmons & Simmons now has a network infrastructure in place that provides the application performance it needs, whilst being easy to manage. “We regularly use the Riverbed central management console (CMC) to review what applications people are using and what traffic is running over the network, so we as IT can report to the board and in-country managers, as well as realign the network to ensure its performance is optimal.”