Baker Donelson Transitions to Remote Work Without Missing a Beat
“One of the things that I’ve been impressed with is that ivision has the resources and are large enough to bring what I need for the firm’s technology resources, but, they’re small enough to actually care about what I’m doing, even personally in my career and at the firm.”
Lance Rea CIOBaker Donelson
Baker Donelson
Baker Donelson is a full-service law firm with 21 offices across the Southeastern United States. It is currently the 64th largest law firm in the US, with more than 700 attorneys and a global network of local counsel to help their clients worldwide.
Setting Up for Success
Lance Rea joined the firm as CIO in February of 2019. He immediately noticed areas for improvements in operational efficiency. There was an opportunity to do hygiene on the network and with their endpoints, as well as emphasizing service across the firm. Baker Donelson prides itself on offering exceptional service to its clients, and Rea wanted that area of focus for his IT team – not only by answering help-desk tickets, but by aligning toward the practice to improve how lawyers can work.
The first big project was to transition the firm from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Within only seven months, Rea’s team – with ivision’s help – moved 1500 endpoints to Windows 10. This ended up being a critical asset when Baker Donelson had to quickly shift their operations in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Because they had a strong Windows 10 desktop and a laptop-enabled workforce for most users, they were able to have more than half of the firm transitioned to remote access within a week and a half.
Partnering With ivision
The Windows 10 transition is not the only project where Rea and ivision have partnered. The ivision team manages Baker Donelson’s SCCM, handle packaging for applications, the operating system and on the endpoints. They complement Baker Donelson’s internal networking staff with 24/7/365 monitoring and patching.
The patching is critical because, as Rea says, “We have a lot of Cisco gear.” The COVID-19 outbreak came on the tail end of an effort with ivision to patch all of the Cisco routers, which was critical for being able to scale up to thousands of VPN users. Earlier this year, Rea’s team also enabled a cloud gateway – a lifesaver now for being able to patch endpoints outside of the network.
“One of the things that I’ve been impressed with is that ivision has the resources and are large enough to bring what I need for the firm’s technology resources,” says Rea. “But, they’re small enough to actually care about what I’m doing, even personally in my career and at the firm.”
