Harbottle & Lewis is a London, UK-based law firm serving media, entertainment, and technology clients for over 60 years. With more than 200 employees, their IT strategy needs to support a remote work structure to ensure secure access and reliable connectivity for employees, regardless of where they are.
The COVID-19 impact
What was once a traditional, office-based environment quickly changed for Harbottle & Lewis in 2020, when workers needed to work remotely for the foreseeable future.
“We had zero visibility – we went from one office to 200 remote worker offices,” said Charlie Laing, Head of Information Technology, Harbottle & Lewis.
After undertaking a transformation to the cloud, the organisation needed to focus on the end user experience of employees. Its legacy VPN client solution was unreliable. Users needed to manually connect and oftentimes didn’t realise they weren’t connected, resulting in decreased productivity and in some cases, lost billable hours.
Network visibility was also an issue for Harbottle & Lewis’ IT team. After pivoting to a remote work structure, many workers experienced network connectivity issues, but the legacy IT approach didn’t have the level of visibility and insight required to adequately diagnose network issues outside their corporate network.
Self-healing networking
Appurity, Harbottle & Lewis’ valued technology partner, introduced the firm to Absolute Secure Access, a solution which could assure a reliable and resilient connection, provide visibility into various networks, and overall improve the experience for remote workers.
“We knew Absolute Secure Access could give us the visibility we needed to improve the remote work experience and provide better support,” said Laing.
Absolute Secure Access delivers capabilities typically only found in separate offerings that make up the modern Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) or Security Service Edge paradigm (e.g., secure tunnel, ZTNA, SWG, CASB, DEM). With Absolute Secure Access, enterprises can make the remote access solution resilient to external factors, leveraging a self-healing Secure Access client for Windows; quickly and easily expand access to networks, the internet, cloud services, and private applications; make applications invisible to unauthorised users, which reduces the attack surface; conduct real-time risk assessments, threat detection and prevention; assure a secure browsing experience for all – desk, mobile, or hybrid users; and improve helpdesk effectiveness by proactively diagnosing and correcting poorly performing networks.
After a successful pilot of Absolute Secure Access, Harbottle & Lewis decided to move forward, replacing the older VPN solution with Absolute’s solution. The decision was also influenced by the level of support Absolute could provide for a smaller law firm.
Once implemented, Harbottle & Lewis was able to gain the visibility needed to adequately troubleshoot and diagnose remote workforce issues, including poor connectivity. This improved the overall experience for remote workers, who could carry on without worrying about being disconnected from the network.
With Absolute Secure Access, Harbottle & Lewis could ensure a reliable, resilient network access for their anywhere workforce while actively improving the end user experience. Reduced connection-related support calls and trouble tickets to IT were required, resulting in fewer lost hours for IT teams and end users The new system also provides a robust remote work solution that can support ever-changing IT environments and transformations to the cloud, as well as secure connections on every network, no matter where the end user is located, allowing a secure, optimised experience. Overall, Harbottle & Lewis benefitted from improved network visibility, allowing IT to proactively troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve remote working issues with various reports.
Now that the ‘work-from-anywhere’ concept is here to stay, many law firms are looking to optimise their IT strategy to support and protect their remote workers.
