Haverstick helps law firm grow
The Client
A major international law firm
The Challenge
LLGM with 11 domestic and 15 international locations, plans to double the number of offices within 24 months. This business objective prompted the firm’s IT organization to assess its existing infrastructure and identify areas that would require enhancements to support this new growth plan. A major WAN Redesign was needed to provide affordable, secure connectivity to international locations. This had to be accomplished while reducing the Wide Area Network operating costs, improving Internet access performance for all locations without increasing costs, and improving the lead time for connecting new offices to the corporate network.All of this while leveraging existing infrastructure investments.
The Haverstick Approach
Haverstick Consulting followed our methodology of developing a solution to our clients challenge.
The first step was to understand the business drivers and requirements for the solution. After gathering all of the requirements, a formal project charter was developed. The charter defined the objectives of the project, resource requirements, roles and responsibilities, and key success criteria.
Our next step was to analyze the existing infrastructure to get a solid understanding of current architecture and leverage points. In addition to the technical aspects, we also reviewed the operating costs of the current WAN. During this activity we discovered that the current frame relay network did meet many of the business requirements and could be leveraged for domestic locations. Our recommendation was to address our client’s needs from two concurrent work streams. The first work stream was focused on optimizing the existing domestic WAN, and the second focused on developing a solution for international locations.
A key component of the first work stream was to develop a formal RFP for frame relay services. The objectives of the RFP were to reduce operating costs, increase bandwidth, and eliminate existing single points of failure in the design.
For the second work stream, we identified multiple solution scenarios for the international locations. We evaluated each scenario based on cost, performance, supportability, scalability, security, and management. After a formal review with our client, a prototype of the preferred solution was demonstrated. During the prototyping we built out the solution in a controlled environment and validated the functional requirements. After the prototyping was complete, we developed detailed technical specification and deployment guidelines documents to be used for full deployment.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution was developed to provide connectivity for all international locations and select domestic locations. This solution allows for remote international sites to have direct Internet access for non-corporate applications, and a secure connection for corporate-based applications over a single link.
To support legacy IPX/SPX-based applications, we developed a “Pure IP” technical specification that allows for the tunneling of IPX traffic through the IP-based VPN.
The VPN solution selected was the Nokia Firewall/VPN Appliance and Checkpoint’s Firewall–1 and VPN-1 products. Technical specifications were developed for deployment to select locations.
The Result
By entering into a formal RFP process for frame relay services, the law firm was able to reduce its current domestic frame relay costs by 40 percent and stay with the same carrier.
The law firm has the flexibility to increase bandwidth to selected sites and still stay within their original budget for frame relay services based on the new savings.
The law firm can connect a new international office to their corporate network through the VPN in half the time it used to take and at roughly 40 percent of the cost. | 
