myhomemove employs over 700 members of staff with offices in Leicester, Manchester, Northampton, and two offices in India. It is a pioneering example in the legal industry of an organisation using innovative technology to provide a better service to its clients. This increased reliance on technology necessarily increases the prospective cost of IT downtime.
Paul Tennant, IT Director at myhomemove, explains: “Technology underpins what we do. At our size we simply have to be available 24/7 – our customers expect to be able to go online and use our systems, such as the client portal, eWay, at any time, and from any place. It’s essential for our partnering organisations too.
“Our legacy tape-based disaster recovery (DR) solution became increasingly unsuitable for protecting our business-critical assets and processes at the scale we needed it to. That’s why we chose Databarracks and their Disaster Recovery as a Service offering – we needed a solution we could trust would deliver, and that could grow with us as our needs change.”
myhomemove now has a new virtual recovery environment hosted on Databarracks’ DRaaS platform capable of failing over on a flexible basis.
“In the event that we have an issue with our core data centres, we’re able to spin up our recovery environment in a matter of minutes. It’s built to be scalable, so we can go from having a limited amount of processing power when we’re just replicating our data, to full-scale deployment if we need to switch all our conveyancing and other processes over,” states Tennant.
It wasn’t just the technology side of disaster recovery that Databarracks assisted with, it was also the process behind it all. The DR specialists equipped myhomemove with a better understanding of business continuity principles, and a greater visibility into their risk profile.
Phillip Alves, IT Service Delivery Manager at myhomemove, said this level of advice and expertise has become invaluable to the business: “Working with Databarracks has made us more aware of what’s at stake if our vital systems go down. It helps that they have a particular understanding and awareness of the legal sector and the associated technology challenges. We’re not just better protected from a technology point of view, we’re also better informed. It’d be hard to cope without them in a disaster now.”
Peter Groucutt, Managing Director at Databarracks, concludes: “Uptime of IT systems is crucial in the time-sensitive legal profession. Manual, tape based recovery just isn’t acceptable anymore. For a business like myhomemove especially, who have a strong focus on connecting with customers through technology-led channels, they need a service they can rely on. We’re very pleased to be working with myhomemove to provide a service that does just that.”
