South Wales-based commercial law firm, Acuity Legal, has extended its contract with IT consultancy Certus IT in a significant three-year deal following a £60,000 technology refresh.
Newport-based Certus IT has signed the outsourcing deal with Acuity Legal to continue to provide IT managed support services and business continuity services after 10 years as Acuity Legal’s preferred IT Supplier.
The refresh included consolidating three servers into a virtualised environment, where multiple virtual servers are hosted on a small number of physical host machines, enabling much more efficient and effective application management and delivering significant energy and cost saving benefits for the business.
The set up provides a secure instant back-up of all clients’ files and information, which will see the company up and running again within an hour in the event of any server failure, as opposed to the typical two to five days that it takes with more traditional back up methods.
Established in 1999, Acuity Legal is now one of Wales’ leading commercial law firms. It recently underwent a re-brand, from M&A Solicitors, to reflect the fact that it now offers a wide range of commercial law services as well as corporate advice on mergers and acquisitions.
This new investment in its network infrastructure and technology will enable the firm to keep up to date with the latest advances in client information security whilst providing facilities to accommodate further expected growth over the next three years.
Neil Maclean-Smith, Finance Director at Acuity Legal, said: “Client security is of the upmost importance to us and we work hard to ensure that our systems are continually up-to-date with the latest security measures. Since our rebrand, we have continued to develop our services and our client base has grown dramatically, increasing our need to update our systems in order to facilitate our growth plans.
“As the most experienced virtualisation solutions provider in Wales, Certus IT was an obvious choice to create the reliable and efficient infrastructure that we needed, as well as providing the highest security and back-up measures.”
The deal sees Certus IT retain its position as preferred IT provider – a position it has held since 2001.
Jason Fitzgerald, sales and marketing director at Certus IT said: “As one of Wales’ leading commercial law firms, Acuity legal had a need to update its systems to continue to provide its clients with the latest security measures, while releasing server space to accommodate its growth plans.
“The recommendation to virtualise the servers was welcomed by Acuity Legal, due to its high availability features and reduced operating costs. Combined with our backup and disaster recovery service, the business can be reassured that its clients’ data will be safe and secure, and its systems can be operational under an hour after an unforeseen IT disaster.
“We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Acuity Legal, to provide our proven IT managed support services, as well as the technology refresh that will help ensure their systems are as secure and efficient as possible.”
Employing 30 staff, Certus IT is one of the largest specialist IT consultancies in south Wales, supplying a range of IT services, including IT infrastructure design and implementation, managed IT support services, information back-up and disaster recovery systems.
At the end of 2011, it launched Certus Data Centre, in conjunction with Next Generation Data Ltd’s NGD Europe, providing high-security managed off site storage at one of Europe’s largest data centres.
Customers include Millennium Stadium, Freshwater PR, Broomfield & Alexander, Premier Global, Tenovus and Watts Gregory.