Legal
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman Achieves API-Driven Automation and Security with Rubrik
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Radar
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Overview
With roots dating back to the late 1800s, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP is one of today’s leading global law firm with offices around the world. Recognized by the Financial Times as one of North America’s most innovative law firms and by legal research firm BTI Consulting as one of the top 20 firms for client service, Pillsbury is highly regarded for their forward-thinking approach. The law firm has also achieved the 13th-highest percentage of Chambers-ranked lawyers among all AmLaw 100 firms.
David Comer, Senior Network Engineer, manages the company’s 100% virtualized infrastructure, ensuring that all data is protected and recoverable for its 1,600 employees. “Our IT strategy is to be on the leading edge of technology,” said Comer. “Both our global staff and clients expect our systems to be up and running 24/7, so we invest heavily in technologies that ensure high application availability. We are always looking for ways to consolidate, be more economical, and help our attorneys be as efficient as possible through innovative technology.”
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP increases time management savings and improves recovery workflows with Rubrik.
Rubrik allows us to easily accommodate our rapid data growth. It also helps us to realize massive cost savings from not having to buy additional storage in the future.
David Comer
Senior Network Engineer![]()
Challenges
- Lengthy VM restore times
- Lack of robust security with legacy data protection solution
- Difficulty creating reports to meet compliance
Results
- 90% faster restores (from an hour to 5 minutes)
- Faster recovery in the event of a Ransomware attack
- 90% management time savings with Rubrik
Business Transformation
- Instant VM recovery with Live Mount
- End-to-end encryption and rapid data recovery
- API-driven automation for centralized monitoring and reporting
Challenges
Inability to scale with cumbersome legacy solution
Prior to Rubrik, Pillsbury’s recovery process was cumbersome and time-consuming. “Our company relies heavily on Exchange, SQL, and Sharepoint to get our work done. With our legacy data management solution, the recovery process for mounting Exchange Databases to recovering mailbox items was extremely manual,” said Comer. “Additionally, it would take us an hour to restore a single VM, and if we were going back more than seven days, we had even greater challenges.”
“Moreover, our previous solution was not scalable, which is critical as our data footprint continues to grow. We needed a new data management solution that could support our fast rate of change,” said Comer. “We had evaluated offerings from other vendors but none of them seemed to be able to effectively deal with data sprawl. The more data we backed up, the more it was going to cost us – it wasn’t ever going to end from a pricing perspective.”
“Rubrik allows us to easily accommodate our rapid data growth. It also helps us to realize massive cost savings from not having to buy additional storage in the future,” said Comer. “Furthermore, my job is much easier now that I have the confidence to quickly recover any data an attorney might need to perform their job function.”
Our previous solution was not scalable, which is critical as our data footprint continues to grow. We needed a new data management solution that could support our fast rate of change.
David Comer
Senior Network Engineer![]()
Solutions
Driving automation with Rubrik’s API-first architecture
Another key reason Pillsbury chose Rubrik was for its robust, API-first architecture. “It is very important to us as a company to work with a vendor that embraces APIs. We are always looking for new ways to integrate automation into our workflows, and Rubrik really impressed us with their extensive suite of RESTful APIs,” said Comer.
“We’re currently leveraging Rubrik’s APIs in a number of ways. Previously, we had chronic scheduling problems that made it impossible to know if our data was adequately protected or if backups had failed. The custom report that we created with Rubrik’s APIs was a perfect fit for our needs. We now get a clean HTML report every morning that provides a bird’s-eye view of any missed snapshots or other data management issues,” said Comer. “We went from spending 30 minutes a day just to determine if our backups were successful to under a minute in the morning to review our report.”
By automating data cleanup through automation scripts, the team has freed up administrative time that can be used for more strategic initiatives. “Rubrik APIs have allowed us to be more agile and flexible as we communicate with other systems,” said Comer.
It is very important to us as a company to work with a vendor that embraces APIs. We are always looking for new ways to integrate automation into our workflows, and Rubrik really impressed us with their extensive suite of RESTful APIs.
David Comer
Senior Network Engineer![]()
The Results
Management simplicity and time savings with Rubrik
“As with most IT teams, saving time while maintaining high performance is what we always strive for,” said Comer. “Our old data management system entailed a lot of administrative overhead that Rubrik has completely eliminated.” Benefits include:
3x faster restores
90% management time savings
Accelerated compliance for PII and HIPAA
Secure protection
Live Mount for VM recovery
Near-zero RTOs
Plug-and-play
Faster Ransomware recovery
Google-like search for fast recovery
Polaris GPS for centralized management
IN KONTAKT