Can Cloud Computing really help your business grow?
Does the application of cloud technology introduce opportunities to improve operational efficiency and better position your company for rapid growth?
Legistics (formerly Copies on Premise) will tell you that it does for them and they can also attest to realizing many other benefits as well, In fact, during the fall of 2010, the Legistics team was facing significant growth and needed a strategic partner to assist in planning, deploying and managing their data center infrastructure environment needs. So after a detailed requirements analysis, Legistics selected Atlantic Metro Communications (AMC). After a few short years, Legistics’s e-Discovery business was growing so rapidly, that they needed a way to scale their technology platforms and the infrastructure environment. In working together with AMC, Legistics developed a process to transition from a traditional hosted environment to a co-location and managed services environment.
This case study discusses the implementation and resulting benefits of AMC’s Cloud Computing solution with Legistics.
What is Cloud Computing?
“Cloud Computing”, as defined by many, refers to the on-demand delivery of information technology resources and software applications via the Internet. Often these services are available via a monthly subscription or pay-as-you-go pricing.
Cloud hosting is growing in popularity for these primary reasons:
- No large upfront investments in hardware, utilities, and internal resources to manage the infrastructure.
- You can provision the right type and size of computing resources your company needs to operate your business or pilot your newest idea.
- You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use.
For many companies, having access to scalable on-demand resources provides access to growth that was never available before. Cloud Computing also enables companies to redesign their business processes for performance and enables them to bring new products and services to market quickly.
The Background: Supporting business shift via technology advances.
Legistics was founded in 1989 as a facilities management company, providing office services to the legal and corporate community. In late 2010, Legistics expanded their offerings to include Litigation Technology Advisory Services (LTAS) for the legal sector, delivering business efficiency and streamlined day-to-day e-Discovery operations to their clients through provisioned Cloud Computing services.
As data and document management services evolved, Legistics shifted its focus to Electronic Data Management (EDM). They have developed a niche in e-Discovery and provides a critical industry solution for identifying, collecting, processing and hosting electronically stored information in support of litigation.
Legistics had two immediate requirements:
- They needed to deploy several industry leading e-Discovery software platforms to their clients in the legal industry.
- They needed to provision those applications as secure private networks for their customers to use.
Initially, they delivered their e-Discovery platform via a standard hosting provider solution. While the solution worked well, it became costly, difficult to scale quickly and to provision secure data services at the rapid pace required by their growing customer demands.
Using the traditional hosting platform, Legistics encountered obstacles with data storage, system backups, provisioning access and overall management and monitoring of the disparate infrastructure components.
During the fall of 2010, Legistics reached out and began working with AMC. AMC was originally contracted for co-location services and Metro Ethernet Internet access.
As the two companies began working together, AMC quickly realized that Legistics was providing provisioned software access for their clients, using disparate technology components to support the solution. What Legistics really needed was to provide provisioned Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in the Cloud for their customers with the access to the software as a component of the provisioned infrastructure.
“Atlantic Metro has always provided us with great service and valuable advice. Their teams takes the time to listen and truly understands our goals and challenges. Atlantic Metro has architected an agile and scalable cloud-infrastructure upon which our business can continue to grow. Copies on Premise has had a great experience working with Atlantic Metro and we look forward to working with their team in the future.”
Jay Collins, Director of Advanced Technology Solutions
The Results: Cloud Computing drives growth for Legistics
Today, Legistics is leveraging the AMC Cloud Computing platform to create their Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) in-order to meet their rapid growth requirements. During 2014, AMC planned and managed the on-boarding of all Legistics services in their AMC VPDC Cloud environment. Now that their technology environment has become easier to manage, they are able to save on overall costs and meet the demands of increased growth with more computing power.
AMC Cloud Storage serves as the primary data repository for Legistics. With an initial commitment of 50TB of storage, they were able to execute their growth plan and has since grown its data repository size two-fold.
The Legistics Cloud Computing environment has grown significantly, with each of their e-Discovery technology platforms being supported by 3 to 45 virtual dependent machines, utilizing over 100TB of storage. Legistics counts on AMC to play a critical role in the design, implementation and continued expansion of its VPDC in AMC’s Cloud environment.
Legistics’s full transition to using a virtual platform through AMC’s Cloud Service has allowed them to eliminate the need to purchase expensive hardware. Rather than having to replace equipment every few years, the cloud technology will and scale to meet their needs.
After establishing a solid cloud-powered infrastructure, Legistics has become an even more agile company.
Why Cloud Computing Works for Legistics
As companies continue pushing more applications and data into the cloud, managing and monitoring cloud computing services has become even more important. Advanced monitoring capabilities have become a very large benefit of Cloud Computing.
Legistics had limited internal resources, and chose to count on AMC for advanced monitoring and managed services. AMC’s Network Monitoring prevents business disruption by proactively detecting and troubleshooting issues before they affect Legistics’s business.
