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Challenges

• Limited redundancy without seamless failover to multiple ISPs
• Complex distributed network, including very remote locations
• No remote management capabilities
• Costly IT support expenses
• High capital costs for insufficient bandwidth
  

Results with Stonesoft

• Uninterrupted network uptime
• Centralized management capabilities for remote office
• Greater technical flexibility
• Increased ROI
• Resilient connectivity with built-in load balancing and clustering

Downloads

• Conyers Dill & Pearman Case Study in A4 size for web (PDF)
  
• Conyers Dill & Pearman Case Study in A4 size for print (PDF)
  
  
• Conyers Dill & Pearman Case Study in letter size for web (PDF)
• Conyers Dill & Pearman Case Study in letter size for print (PDF)

Case Study: Conyers Dill & Pearman

StoneGate Ensures Always-on Business Connectivity for Global Operations

StoneGate simplifies complex distributed network management

Based in Bermuda, and one of the largest off-shore based law firms, Conyers Dill & Pearman needed a superior networking solution to ensure continuous business uptime and minimize the difficulties of managing a complex distributed network. This was essential to maintaining the firm’s global productivity, especially in remote places.

After evaluating several solutions, the company chose to cluster and deploy the StoneGate firewall/VPN solution with Multi-Link™ technology to guarantee seamless ISP and device failover, maintain always-on connectivity across its branch locations despite ISP downtime, device outages or inclement weather, and enhance network performance.

The firm experienced  immediate benefits by clustering the StoneGate firewall/VPN solution at each location,remotely managing network security updates from headquarters and reducing scheduled maintenance windows, which significantly reduced overall IT costs.

Achieving enhanced productivity with global reach

Established in 1928, Conyers Dill & Pearman is a well-respected multi-jurisdictional offshore law firm that works with clients around the globe ensuring that pressing legal matters, in the areas of company and commercial law, commercial litigation, and private client dealings, are handled in a timely manner.

The firm maintains a wide-ranging and vigorous law practice that has significantly expanded to include eight different jurisdictions: Bermuda, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, British Virgin Islands, Cayman, Anguilla, and most recently Dubai.

Since the firm services clients across varying time zones, it is vitally important that Conyers Dill & Pearman’s global operations have continuous business uptime to proficiently handle pressing legal matters and offer its clients a truly seamless experience in using offshore international law services.

Meeting business growth with proactive measures

The firm’s expansive infrastructure – over 400 companywide employees with approximately 250 staff in Bermuda and 150 workers in global locations – and distributed systems design, required that Conyers Dill & Pearman’s IT staff take a proactive approach to maintaining its technology systems to support the company’s growing business needs. This was critical to the firm’s ability to mitigate the potential networking and security challenges that can arise within distributed environments, while ensuring that business interruptions were avoided.

The firm’s IT, information systems and support were centralized at its Bermuda location, and Conyers Dill & Pearman’s IT staff started evaluating their VPN solution to gauge if it could handle the demands of adding new remote locations.

Since each new branch office that the firm added would be linked back to the kernel network via a VPN, having a solution that featured failover capabilities was necessary to maintaining continuous communications between the global offices.
"The firm had one central domain name, so that all email was routed through Bermuda and then distributed over VPN’s to overseas offices", explains Conyers Dill & Pearman IT Manager Ken Siggins.

In order to plan ahead for business continuity and be confident that our network technologies would scale to meet the pace of our growing business needs, we needed a fully redundant VPN solution.”

Partner recommends Multi-Link technology to prevent network downtime

Conyers Dill & Pearman contracted with CCS, a Bermuda-based integrator that has a wide range of experience with security and high availability, to evaluate VPN products that would guarantee uptime.

After CCS evaluated the project, CCS presented Stonesoft’s integrated StoneGate Firewall/VPN solution with Multi-Link technology, and the firm was immediately impressed with the superior failover capabilities that seamlessly ensured Internet redundancy across multiple ISPs.

The StoneGate platform also offered Conyers Dill & Pearman a total network security solution for a strong perimeter defense with VPN reliability, adding a level of insurance that supported the organization’s business continuity initiatives.

Conyers Dill & Pearman signed with CCS and selected the StoneGate firewall/VPN primarily because of the Multi-Link technology that supports continuous network uptime, ISP load-balancing and efficient Internet connectivity – even during scheduled network updates.
 

Patented clustering technology ensures business as usual in unusual places

The StoneGate Firewall/VPN solution solved several immediate and underlying network security issues, including redundancy and enhanced network management.

During the installation the firm’s network engineer traveled to each of the eight locations to implement the new firewall/VPN appliances, while CCS established the connections via StoneGate’s remote management function to configure the devices. The network engineer worked with CCS through the global scale deployment process to troubleshoot common network challenges as they came up.

Initially, the firm purchased a 10-site license but has already added several more appliances to equip the latest Conyers Dill & Pearman branch in Dubai. All locations were installed with clustered StoneGate firewall/ VPN  node, and the kernel network in Bermuda has dual ISP connections.

The StoneGate solution definitely gives us what we were looking for in terms of feature sets and capabilities. The results were immediate after deploying the StoneGate firewall/VPN as we were able to route specific firewall traffic within the first week by graphically setting up rules and efficiently making changes across the network, saving us a tremendous amount of time compared to our previous solution.”

Centralized management of complex, remote networks

In addition to resilient connectivity, Conyers Dill & Pearman realized that Stonesoft’s solutions proved much easier to manage in  a distributed environment. The StoneGate Management Center enables network administrators to access an up-to-date view of the firm’s dispersed network activity by querying log servers and aggregating data into one place.

The remote update capabilities are also a great asset to the network engineers when they are rolling out new firewall policies, updating software, changing features or ISPs.

In order to put a new rule in place on our previous firewalls, I had to manually update it in six different locations before the rule could work. Before deploying StoneGate, the addition of a rule could take any where from  two or three hours and now it takes a few minutes – which  is a huge improvement. Also, having the graphical interface  is great because we can easily see what is in place.”

Increased network security ROI

Through StoneGate’s technical modularity, network engineers can customize settings down to the application  level to best meet the firm’s top-line security and business  continuity priorities, ensuring a higher ROI on network  security.

Conyers Dill & Pearman has also saved on bandwidth management costs with StoneGate’s compression capabilities. The firm can now push more traffic across the same  size pipe previously used before the firm added its last  two locations.

From a management point-of-view, the StoneGate solution gives us greater technical flexibility to be proactive  in supporting a strong contingency plan. The VPN’s Multi-Link resilient connectivity with dynamic  reconfiguration gives us the capabilities to better protect  the firm against the negative impacts of network downtime.”

Since using StoneGate the firm has enjoyed continuous connectivity with no major network interruptions – even  during remote systems upgrades and regularly scheduled  maintenance.

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