Allen and Overy extends outsourcing deal

Law firm Allen and Overy has extended its outsourcing deal with IT services company Savvis to include the management of its server and storage infrastructure.

The £6.8m contract extension brings the total agreement with Savvis to £12m following a £5.5m hosting deal announced early in 2006.

The extended deal will see the law firm migrate its server and storage area network infrastructure to the Savvis data centre site, located on the outskirts of London.

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Allen and Overy CIO Dave Burwell told silicon.com: "Essentially, Savvis is now responsible for our whole infrastructure and for the operation of that infrastructure on a day-to-day basis."

Among other things, the infrastructure supports the firm's corporate website, intranet and document management system. The firm's internal data centre at its London office will also be managed by Savvis.

Burwell explained that as the firm oversees multi-billion dollar deals with critical deadlines, the IT infrastructure must be reliable and well managed.

He said: "It's a pretty critical infrastructure for not only the UK but worldwide. It's critical to us, but it's not critical that we ourselves do it."

He added: "We're moving a critical service to a reliable, external supplier to free up some management bandwidth so that we can begin to concentrate on other things."

These other areas include the improvement of the firm's extranet and intranet services and implementing an enterprise search engine.

There are also plans to support the infrastructure of the firm's other European offices from a UK hub. Burwell said: "We're going to move to essentially a thin office model."

The two organisations have been working on the migration for around two months so far and Burwell hopes the migration will be complete by the beginning of September.