Customer suCCess

Legal Aid Center of southern Nevada restoring Justice and Data Faster with symantec and Kortek solutions

With 18,000 clients in the past year and demand growing, Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada provides free legal advice and representation to low-income residents who can’t afford an attorney. With a spike in the state’s population growth and 11.2 percent of Southern Nevadans below the poverty line, these services are essential. The non-profit firm seeks to maximize its services to the community by keeping administrative costs low. To achieve this goal, the center turned to IT services provider and Symantec Partner Kortek Solutions, and security and data protection solutions from Symantec. Results include an 85 percent reduction in backup times and nine-fold faster recoveries.

Legal aid for the needy

Not everyone can afford a $50,000 retainer, much less $500 per hour to have their legal matters addressed. But where do low-income people turn if they can’t afford a lawyer to address wrongs committed by an unscrupulous landlord? Who will speak before the court for a neglected or abused child?

For low-income residents of Las Vegas, there’s an option. The Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada provides free quality legal advice, advocacy, and representation to individuals unable to protect their rights because they can’t afford an attorney. With 11.2 percent of Southern Nevadans living below the poverty line, services of the state’s largest non-profit law firm are vital to the region.

Having an effective IT system at Legal Aid is a high priority, as it plays a crucial role in supporting daily operations. “I don’t know if we would be out of business if our system went down, but it certainly would create a problem,” says Terry Bratton, legal administrator with the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada. “We would be back to the old days of the legal industry, where things were done in triplicate.”

orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe

Website: www.lacsn.org

Industry: Legal

Headquarters: Las Vegas, Nevada

employees: 60

symANteC soLutIoNs

Endpoint Security

Messaging Security

Data Protection

Why symantec?

· Greater efficiency in data protection and security with fast payback

· Fast, image-based server recovery minimizes downtime

· Accurately identifies spam and virus intrusions

· Low maintenance, image-based data protection

Customer suCCess LeGAL AID CeNter oF soutHerN NevADA

maximizing service to the community

As a non-profit relying on grants and dona-tions, Legal Aid has reduced administrative costs to 8–10 percent of its operating bud-get, enabling it to devote more to assisting the community. “We operate very lean, sim-ply because we’re trying to spend our funding and resources on direct services rather than additional support staff,” Bratton says. “This causes us to rely much more heavily on tech-nology than most private law firms.”

For Legal Aid, IT is a savings driver. “Having technology as the backbone of our organiza-tion allows us to provide much greater depth of service,” says Bratton. “Without having the burden of a larger support staff, we’re able to utilize the savings in resources and direct that back into serving a greater number of people.”

To help achieve this goal, and because it is unable to add IT staff due to budget constraints, Legal Aid turned to IT services provider and Symantec Partner Kortek Solutions. “We were very fortunate when we found Kortek Solutions,” says Bratton. “They came in and automatically understood what our needs were, what our mission was, and how to support our network with Symantec solutions.”

A growing need for substantial It support

As the state has grown in population— 30 percent in the last decade—so has Legal Aid. With 18,000 clients served in 2009, a one-third increase from the previous year, Legal Aid hired 10 additional staff in 2009, and currently has 28 attorneys. Legal Aid has also outgrown its offices, adding a remote office site, and has plans to build its own office building with a February 2011 groundbreaking.

With the expansion, Legal Aid needed to up-grade its IT system. “We’ve been able to uti-lize the expertise of Kortek Solutions, not only to maintain our network, but help it to grow,” says Bratton. “They’ve been an integral part in helping us upgrade.”

As part of the upgrade and to accommodate the remote office site, Kortek increased the speed of the network with additional band-width and new gigabit switches, installed new firewalls, and added virtual private net-work (VPN) functionality and distributed file systems (DFS). And with new servers, up-grading with Symantec solutions was key.

“We were able to provide Symantec solutions for Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada that would not only make their network run better and more reliably, but also enable them to adapt future technology more cost effec-tively,” says Lyle Epstein, president of Kortek Solutions.

soLutIoN At A GLANCe

Key Challenges

• Block spam and email borne viruses

• Recover individual files quickly

• Gain support from a trusted service provider

symantec Products

• Symantec™ Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition, with

– Symantec™ Endpoint Protection

– Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery

symantec services

• Symantec Basic Maintenance Services

symantec Partner

• Kortek Solutions (korteksolutions.com)

technology environment

• Server platform: Kortek Solutions White Box/Intel Modular Server, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

• Applications: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Perfect Practice, Microsoft Windows 2008, Microsoft SharePoint 2010

• Databases: Advantage Database Server, Microsoft SQL Server 2005

• Storage: Kortek Solutions White Box Intel SAN

BusINess resuLts AND teCHNICAL BeNeFIts• 85% reduction in backup times

• Projected $100 saved monthly on IT service calls

• 95% reduction in endpoint management times

• Nine-fold faster recovery of electronic files

“We were very fortunate when we

found Kortek Solutions. They came

in and automatically understood

what our needs were, what our

mission was, and how to support our

network with Symantec solutions.”

terry Bratton

Legal Administrator

Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada

Customer suCCess LeGAL AID CeNter oF soutHerN NevADA

Adds Bratton, “With the ability to protect the network from many different areas, from endpoint to email, and the ability to add new machines and deploy software, Symantec Protection Suite has proven to be very flexi-ble,” he says. “As the product is well sup-ported and updated by Symantec, we can continue to use it in the future as our prac-tice grows, without needing to spend on an-other product suite.”

maximum protection with 95 percent less management time

A long-time Symantec AntiVirus customer, Legal Aid upgraded to Symantec™ Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition to boost its security profile. “This is the ideal program: it allows us to see what kind of intrusions are coming in, where we might have a breach,” says Bratton. “It also provides us with a lot of information about what’s happening on our network.”

Symantec Protection Suite Advanced Busi-ness Edition includes Symantec™ Endpoint Protection on desktops and laptops and ad-vanced mail security on Legal Aid’s servers and at the Internet gateway. These compo-nents work together to effectively block vi-ruses, spyware, and spam in incoming and outgoing email and instant messages. As a result, security management time is mini-mized. “Mail security products we’ve used in the past would consume 10 to 12 hours a week, because they couldn’t figure out what was spam and what wasn’t,” says Epstein. “The Symantec solution requires a half hour a week, if that, just to look at reports and go, ‘oh, it’s all working great.’”

Increasing productivity with effective reporting

The reporting feature of Symantec Protection Suite provides Legal Aid with a full picture of activity on its network, and to remedy potential issues. “It not only allows us to plan our programmatic growth, but to identify areas that might potentially be a weakness,” says Bratton.

With the content filtering and data loss pre-vention features of Symantec Protection Suite, Legal Aid is able to identify and ad-dress human resource issues with employ-ees. “You’re not aware that an employee has been Internet shopping until you see some of these reports,” says Bratton. “We’ve identi-fied that as a problem with a couple of folks who we’ve corrected, and it’s actually helped increase their productivity.”

eliminating $1,200 annually in service costs

Symantec Protection Suite is also helping Legal Aid reduce IT support costs. “We had individuals who came to me and said, ‘My computer’s locked up,’ because of a virus. And it’s then a break-fix call to Kortek,” says Bratton. “Prior to rolling out Symantec Pro-tection Suite, we had to do a complete re-store on several workstations to get them back up and running. And we haven’t had that problem since.”

Symantec Protection Suite is minimizing malware issues and service calls to Kortek, allowing Legal Aid to save a projected $1,200 per year. “Because Symantec Endpoint Protection Suite has eliminated many tech-nology problems that we’ve had in the past that required downtime and outsourced as-sistance to correct,” says Bratton, “we’ll be able to reduce service call costs in our an-nual line item budget, increasing the funds available for services.”

Legal Aid benefits from both Symantec Basic Maintenance Services and Symantec Authorized Technical Assistance Partner Program (TAPP), which allows Symantec partners such as Kortek to deliver improved levels of technical assistance. “We like the business-hour support we get from Symantec,” says Bratton. “Kortek calls in on our behalf using the Symantec TAPP support.”

“We were able to provide Symantec

solutions for Legal Aid Center

of Southern Nevada that would

not only make their network run

better and more reliably, but

also enable them to adapt future

technology more cost effectively.”

Lyle epstein

President

Kortek Solutions

Customer suCCess LeGAL AID CeNter oF soutHerN NevADA

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, and Backup Exec are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. symantec document # 21038154

reducing backup times by 85 percent

As Legal Aid continued to grow, its tape backup system became an issue. “It was an adequate system. But as we were growing, that technology was becoming outdated for our size,” says Bratton. “It was becoming much more inefficient for us.”

Kortek recommended that Legal Aid use the capabilities of Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery, included in Symantec Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition, to migrate from tape backups to image-based backups on disk. “Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery has been an incredible time saver,” says Bratton. “I was spending five hours a week working on backups. Now it’s maybe 45 minutes a week. The solution has been essential in helping us to reduce the amount of time that we have to devote to backups.”

Nine-fold faster file recovery

Another advantage with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery and image-based disk backups is faster recovery. “Recovering a file from tape used to involve going back to evaluate our schedule of tapes, locating the correct tape, trying to install the tape, review, looking for the correct file, then restoring it,” says Bratton. “That can take as much as 45 minutes to an hour. Now with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, it’s done in five minutes.”

The advantages are many with Kortek and Symantec solutions. “Kortek Solutions has been integral in establishing the right solu-tions for us,” says Bratton. “Symantec Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition was absolutely the product that we needed. It’s helping us move forward, increase our productivity, reduce our resource outlay, and helping us to help the community—which is our ultimate mission. Without Symantec, we couldn’t be doing this.”

“Recovering a file from tape used

to take as much as 45 minutes

to an hour. Now with Symantec

Backup Exec System Recovery,

it’s done in five minutes.”

terry Bratton

Legal Administrator

Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada