With a team of more than 100 partners and 650 staff members, this UK Law Firm combines specialist knowledge, extensive experience, and practical business sense. They work with various clients including businesses, individuals, families, government bodies, and non-profit organisations.
INDUSTRY: Law
REGION: UK
EMPLOYEES: 650
OFFICES: 5
CHALLENGES
- Firewall refresh and the pursuit of a zero trust alternative
- Improve user experience for hybrid workers
- Enhance security posture when embracing cloud
SOLUTIONS
- Single-vendor SASE from Netskope, including Netskope Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope Intelligent SSE
- CrowdStrike Falcon Complete
- EveryCloud ‘Cloud Aware’
RESULTS
- Consolidation of multiple legacy vendors for cost and operational benefits
- Improved security posture
- Optimised user experience for productivity gains
LINKING ASSOCIATED CHALLENGES FOR A HOLISTIC SOLUTION
The firm was due a firewall refresh and was keen to investigate ways in which modernising the infrastructure could allow the firm to pursue a zero-trust approach to remote access – a strategy the firm’s cyber insurer was also encouraging.
The company was progressing well through an ambitious growth plan, including strategic acquisition, and was fast outgrowing its technical infrastructure. Two factors converged to lead the Director of Technology to go in search of a different approach to the old hardware set-up. They had originally adopted a SaaS-first strategy and was working through the migration to the cloud of practice management systems, document management, and CRM.
At the same time, the company was moving to a hybrid working model which meant on-premises technology no longer made sense.
As cloud and hybrid work were embraced, it was clear that maintaining the old security and networking architectures was bringing unnecessary costs and negatively impacting user experience, and so the Director of Technology brought in trusted delivery partner, EveryCloud, to help design a new approach.
It was clear that the organisational changes created an opportunity for cost savings and technological consolidation. EveryCloud helped to identify that SASE held huge promise for the firm in addressing their challenges, way beyond a tactical firewall refresh.
SASE FOR DATA PROTECTION, THREAT PROTECTION AND LEAST PRIVILEGED ACCESS
With the support of EveryCloud, they prepared a transformation plan which involved the replacement of various vendors across VPN, Web Proxy, Firewalls, MPLS networks, Endpoint Protection, and SOC/Incident Management. Replacing the previously disjointed point solutions with a platform approach – including a single-vendor SASE architecture – brought immediately evident cost savings for the law firm, both through the overarching licensing as well as through integration and management efficiencies.
Netskope SASE includes Intelligent SSE, with Netskope Private Access for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), which enables the company to impose ‘least privileged access’ across its user base. This is a widely-recognised best practice which meets the requirements for robust cyber insurance policies. With this approach, users are only granted appropriate cloud and resource access levels and are continually checked to ensure that if the context of their access changes (for instance if they move to an unsecured network or unfamiliar device), their privileges can be adjusted dynamically. The technology is also hugely beneficial for acquisitions as the firm continues on its high growth strategy, with users from mergers being onboarded swiftly and securely.
The firm’s security posture has taken a huge step forward with their Netskope SASE implementation and integration with Crowdstrike. Instead of trying to fit user behaviours around static security, the business can go about its work, and their security is clever enough to flex and maintain protections across all the places their data resides, and from wherever their users are accessing it.
SASE FOR CONSISTENT USER EXPERIENCE FOR HYBRID TEAMS
For any law firm, data protection is a critical requirement, and because the new approach is cloud-native, data loss prevention and data protection just got a lot more granular.
And the benefits did not stop there. User experience was a key driver of the project, with the team adopting Netskope Borderless SD-WAN in place of costly MPLS connections in order to better fit the dispersed remote workers and ensure a consistent access experience regardless of user location. The company opted for the hardware option for Netskope’s Borderless SD-WAN and benefits from consistent network performance and unified security and connectivity policies wherever their teams need to work.
Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope SSE are all managed through one console, ensuring the team huge efficiencies in managing policy for both security and network performance.
The cost savings delivered by EveryCloud – replacing MPLS connections with Netskope Borderless SD-WAN – have been significant, but not only that; the fact they can now ensure consistency of application experience wherever their users go… and all through the same console as the one through which they manage their security policy… has huge resourcing benefits for them.
Download the Case Study here
