Osborne Clarke partners with NetMotion to provide fee earners and partners a seamless user experience and secure remote access
NetMotion, a provider of security solutions for the world’s rapidly expanding mobile and remote workforce, today revealed it is now playing a pivotal role in the security and connectivity stack of international legal practice Osborne Clarke, as the firm adapts to the needs of its remote workforce.
Osborne Clarke is an award-winning international legal practice, with offices in Europe, Asia and the USA. The firm boasts over 270 partners and more than 900 lawyers across its 25 locations and specialises in a range of sectors, including tech, media and communications, energy and utilities, financial services, retail and consumer, life sciences and healthcare, real estate, workforce solutions and transport and automotive.
In a short space of time, Osborne Clarke was able to rapidly scale internationally. To support this expansion, in 2016 the firm decided to provide all employees with a laptop as part of a new ‘Connected Working’ policy. Beginning with the Reading office in the UK – the first of their offices to be truly agile – this program has been extended across the entire organisation.
Like many other firms, Osborne Clarke experienced various connectivity challenges with fee earners travelling, 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.
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 tunnelling 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.
Myles Manning, Client Interface and Solutions Manager, Osborne Clarke said: “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.”
For more information about NetMotion’s legal services division, visit: https://www.netmotionsoftware.com/netmotion-for-the-legal-sector
