11 December 2024
DAC Beachcroft is a leading international legal business with more than 2,600 people in locations across the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. It takes a partnership approach with its clients, providing tailored commercial, transactional, claims, risk and advisory legal services, to help them achieve sustainable growth and to defend their business and reputation.
Going global
With the international side of its business continuing to expand and increased pressures being placed upon network infrastructure, DAC Beachcroft needed to put in place a global network that could provide the performance and resilience the organisation needed to maintain operations across a wider geographical area.
“We’re becoming a much more internationally-focused business, and we needed to move away from our reliance on our mostly UK network and our onsite infrastructure,” said David Aird, IT Director at DAC Beachcroft. “We decided to look for a network partner with a worldwide reach that could support us across the globe and could scale with us as we grew internationally.”
Following a tender process, DAC Beachcroft chose a flexible, global MPLS network solution from Colt.
“Colt offered a robust solution that represented good value, and had the network reach to provide the services our business increasingly needs across the globe,” said Aird. “I believe that people buy from people and that was certainly the case here. We liked the Colt team and they seem to be a good fit culturally.”
Resilience and reliability
Colt provides a global MPLS network to around 20 sites around the world, including all of DAC Beachcroft’s main locations across South America and EMEA. Colt’s multi-meshed MPLS network connects fibre on-net, DSL, Ethernet-First-Mile, and partner covered sites integrating underlying technologies into homogenous Virtual Private Networks.
By teaming up with Colt, DAC Beachcroft was able to connect its locations, people and data with a flexible, resilient network that can adapt quickly to changes in the business.
“With Colt, we have a reliable and truly global network now,” said Aird. “Colt was extremely thorough in providing a much greater level of resiliency to each of our offices and making sure we have greater diversity and no single points of failure.”
This makes sure that DAC Beachcroft’s business can always continue operating, protecting its revenue and reputation. Supporting the legal company’s ambitions, The Colt network supports DAC Beachcroft’s business goals by helping it to expand into new areas.
Given the recent focus upon expanding the international business, alongside the company’s rapid growth, DAC Beachcroft continues to explore new opportunities.
“Working with Colt makes it easier to resolve problems and to manage change, because the team is really responsive and professional,” explained Aird. “Whenever we need support with new offices, or moves, adds and changes, it’s really easy to get things done and they happen quickly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, we needed more capacity rapidly and Colt responded extremely quickly. Their attitude was focused on enabling our business, rather than admin and processes creating an unnecessary barrier – a single phone call meant that within a day or two we had the extra capacity installed.”
Moreover, a recent technical workshop explored the potential benefits of moving to an SD WAN model in the future to accommodate DAC Beachcroft’s rapidly progressing cloud strategy. According to Aird, as the company moves towards cloud, it’s looking forward to working with the Colt team on agilely making changes to the current infrastructure and the technologies in use.
“Colt’s willingness to be flexible and to be led by our changing needs, rather than being commercially rigid, is something we really appreciate,” added Aird.
