Case study: Osborne Clarke partners with NetMotion to provide fee earners and partners with a seamless user experience and secure remote access
The Challenges
Osborne Clarke is an award-winning International legal practice, with offices situated around Europe, Asia, and the USA. The firm boasts over 270 Partners and more than 900 lawyers in 25 locations. In a short space of time, Osborne Clarke rapidly scaled internationally and enabled all employees with laptops through their agile IT strategy and ‘Connected Working Policy’.
Like many other firms, Osborne Clarke experienced various connectivity challenges with fee earners traveling, working remotely, commuting, and visiting clients. The firm’s IT team attempted to enable fee earners to use this time as if they were still in the office. However, factoring in unreliable connectivity and variable network conditions outside the office environment made this a growing challenge.
For Osborne Clarke’s IT team, deeper visibility into how apps, networks and devices were being utilised and performing whilst in or out of the office was required. This would ensure that issues could be identified quickly and reduce the amount of service desk tickets being raised.
The Solution
As Osborne Clarke replaced its existing legacy VPN tool, which struggled to meet these new demands, the simple-to-manage NetMotion platform, (including both best-in-class VPN & Zero Trust Network Access functionality) gave fee earners a completely secure environment to access company resources. This also allowed users to avoid application time outs and re-authentication whenever connections dropped or switched.
It also faced a number of challenges around accessing corporate resources, including their video conference solution. The NetMotion policy engine enabled the firm to shape network traffic to help balance security measures with a seamless user experience for its remote workers. With NetMotion’s granular split tunneling capability, the firm is now able to secure, monitor and control traffic flowing both inside and outside the VPN tunnel. This is helping them transition to the cloud in a flexible manner, as they split more cloud traffic out of the VPN.
In addition, the NetMotion platform includes digital experience monitoring, which keeps a comprehensive record of connections and connection failures, with detailed reasonings for any issues impacting remote workers. Osborne Clarke can now proactively and efficiently identify, diagnose and fix issues related to remote working, decreasing the meantime to resolution for support desk teams and reducing downtime for employees.
“As an IT team, we used to support 25 offices globally. With the shift to remote working due to the pandemic, we’re now effectively supporting 2000 offices globally. The Mobile IQ part of NetMotion’s offering is the perfect piece for us, as now we know exactly what’s going on. NetMotion instantly gives us real insight into the overall user experience,” said Myles Manning, client interface and solutions manager, Osborne Clarke.
“I don’t want the trial to end if I’m honest! For me, this has been a success. NetMotion enables seamless working across networks without disconnecting. Overall, I prefer working with NetMotion than our previous VPN,” adds Manning.
The Results
NetMotion now plays a pivotal role in Osborne Clarke’s security and connectivity stack as the firm continues to make the shift to meet the demands of the remote workforce. NetMotion provides an encrypted, persistent connection for fee earners and senior partners to ensure they have the same reliable in-office experience anywhere they choose to work.
- Remote workers stay connected to their devices and applications
- Support teams can proactively identify, diagnose, and fix remote working issues impacting fee earners
- Real-time insight into performance and utilisation of technology being used outside the office environment
- Quick to deploy, simple to manage, and can easily scale
- NetMotion provides unbreakable connectivity using tunnel and app session persistence – users have a seamless/ ‘office like’ experience wherever they choose to work
- Video and audio application traffic is optimised – improved experience on video conferencing tools
- Powerful policy engine to prioritise, visualise and shape traffic (inside and outside the VPN tunnel) to ensure users have the best possible experience whilst working remotely
