Secure SASE for Legal Firms


Privacy laws and protection of client and IP data is mission critical for legal forms. With digital transformation paving the way for new opportunities and amplified efficiency to protect sensitive data, the legal sector is leaning in, making new technology adoption a key priority. An increasing number of law firms are adopting new-age work models to synergize their branch offices and deliver a frictionless and secure end-user experience to their employees and clients. Legal firms are now adopting new methods to strengthen their services by:

  • Migrating data and applications to the cloud which has helped with easy storage and instant access to client data irrespective of where the users are located
  • Leveraging VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is helping office staff quickly and securely access sensitive client records on their mobile devices
  • Utilizing video conferencing is helping connect with partners and clients across the world
  • Implementing new collaboration tools are helping streamline everyday operations such as case management, client meetings, effort and expense tracking, resources training, document sharing, and more

Moving to a New Way of Legal Practice

While these technological innovations are helping legal firms outgrow legacy work practices and meet modern-day, tech-savvy consumer expectations, integrating and running them efficiently and cost-effectively with a legacy WAN network continues to be a significant challenge.

  • Real-time applications such as Video and VoIP used for virtual consultations are bandwidth-heavy. Legacy WAN running primarily on expensive, bandwidth-limited MPLS lines is unable to support the demands of increased traffic, leading to frequent network outages. This has resulted in dropped calls, choppy audio, and jitter-ridden video, impacting client experience.
  • Cloud has undoubtedly helped law firms build business scalability and efficiency, but security continues to be a huge concern. Law firms deal with highly sensitive information such as client statements, sensitive IP, and case evidence that need robust protection. With static data center security and complex hardware systems, legacy WAN is incapable of delivering the kind of security required for cloud platforms. In addition, with remote working becoming the new normal, cyberattacks are only going to spike up.
  • Legal firms are also bound by data privacy regulations such as EU’s GDPR and USA’s CCPA acts. A legacy WAN network with complex architecture, multiple interfaces, and poor visibility makes adherence to these mandates across all branches a laborious and time-consuming task.
  • Datacenter backhauling for security reasons slows down application performance, further delaying overall operations and productivity, incurring added costs.
  • Mergers and acquisitions are an inherent part of the for a law firms’ growth and survival strategy. Setting up or integrating new branches with a legacy WAN network is a nightmare, taking as long as three months, slowing down time-to-market.

25%

25%

of all law firms practicing in the United States alone have experienced at least one data breach.


Protecting Attorney-Client Data with SASE

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic influx, improve real-time interactions, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, the legal sector is now turning to Secure SD-WAN.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.


 

Always Available Network

Secure SD-WAN offers the ability to aggregate multiple connections of any type, such as MPLS, broadband, wireless 4G, and LTE. By leveraging all available bandwidth, Secure SD-WAN makes the network agile enough to support more traffic volumes, and changing bandwidth demands. Doing so ensures continuous network availability and uninterrupted access to bandwidth-intensive applications hosted on the cloud. Secure SD-WAN’s multiple transport link resilience further helps significantly cut down MPLS driven bandwidth costs.

 

High Application Performance

Secure SD-WAN architecture embeds application intelligence, enabling deep packet inspection by the network, beyond its source and destination. It intelligently prioritizes application traffic based on business-intent policies and automatically directs them across the ideal transport route. This helps ensure mission-critical tools and applications are always running smoothly, even during network outages, further improving application reliability and quality of experience. It also enables IT to spend less time dealing with network complexities and have more time and focus applied to business applications and services.

 

Centralized Management and Control

With centralized management and control, Secure SD-WAN dramatically simplifies WAN deployment and monitoring. Using simple, template-driven workflows, it eliminates tedious, error-prone configurations. With zero-touch deployment, the IT team can deploy patches, roll out policy updates across all branches from a single central orchestrator in one-go. Secure SD-WAN also offers deep granular visibility into applications, devices, and users to immediately detect and fix anomalies. With a cloud-based Secure SD-WAN, technology companies can effortlessly manage their complex networks, quickly propagate or integrate new remote branches (in less than a month!), and simply plug-in to instantly connect to cloud services. By eliminating the need for manual visits to each branch site, Secure SD-WAN also helps save substantial operational costs.

 

Secure Connectivity

Secure SD-WAN ’s segmentation enables IT to securely consolidate disparate physical environments into a single network. In doing so, they can isolate and prioritize mission-critical traffic from the regular traffic for robust security and better user experience. Additionally, Secure SD-WAN also integrates end-to-end multi-layer security with best-of-breed features such as next-gen firewall, encryption, contextual awareness, and more. These deeper security capabilities allow technology companies to steer away from data center backhauling of cloud traffic, and instead directly access cloud data and applications, without fearing security risks.