ic case study | LEGAL SERVICES
Knights plc are the UK’s fastest growing professional services business, delivering outstanding results for their clients. Knights plc has been named as 65th in the UK Top 100 by The Lawyer’s annual analysis of the UK legal sector, jumping 38 places since 2016. Their team of over 930 professionals across 14 regional locations enables them to provide consistently high quality professional services.
SITUATION
Knights plc were using legacy voice and internet solutions which meant that email, internal backups, and billing systems weren’t able to run reliably or continuously. It was also restricting the phone system technology they were able to use, meaning costs were high and phone system features were limited. Knights plc were also growing rapidly, and needed the ability to format the opening of new branches to make new deployments swift and secure, in line with exponential growth.
Internet Central are really accessible and responsive, we consider them an extension of
our IT team.
Nigel Johnson
IT DIRECTOR
KNIGHTS PLC
TASK
Knights plc needed to clean up a series of legacy systems and networks to provide a seamless, high-speed network for both data and voice to enable flexible phone system options. Knights plc needed to separate their internet traffic and deploy Quality of Service to ensure time sensitive applications could run uninterrupted, whilst maintaining security and control.
Due to Knights plc’s high growth plans, the network design had to scale easily to efficiently consolidate other networks. Knights plc also needed a way to quickly roll out secure remote working to their team to centralise company email and internal systems access.
ACTION
Knights plc wanted something more sophisticated than typical leased line connectivity. With the benefit of Internet Central’s flexible core network, Knights plc provisioned all UK-wide offices on a private network. This meant that all offices could communicate with one another through one central location and be content, knowing that if any site were to drop its connectivity, it would have an auto-failover backup in place for business continuity (SD-WAN).
RESULT
Internet Central provided Knights plc with a national core network with Fortigate UTM (Unified Threat Management) Firewall throughout. Internet Central deployed a solution to enable existing and new offices to connect to each other quickly and seamlessly with full disaster recovery mode in operation in the event of a network failure. Internet Central continue to provide new site infrastructure
investigation project planning. This helps to identify and choose new premises that could be well served by Dedicated Fibre, to minimalize additional installation delays
and at the best cost. During the initial deployment, ‘Fortitokens’ (A Fortinet Multi Factor Authentication product) were issued to some of Knights’ users for secure remote working, Internet Central were able to rapidly roll these out companywide when COVID-19 hit and those that could, had to work from home, enabling secure access to everything they needed from email to invoicing, resulting in full business continuity.
We utilised MPLS & SD-WAN networks combined with Internet Central’s managed firewalls resulting in, not only cost savings, but also a more manageable, flexible and secure infrastructure to
support our continued growth.
Chris Johnson
SENIOR IT MANAGER
KNIGHTS PLC
Internet Central Limited
Innovation Centre 2, Keele Science Park, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5NH
Registered Office: Ivy House Foundry, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent ST1 3NR. Reg No. 03079542. VAT No. GB 278 923 705.
All trademarks and logos appearing on the site are the property of their respective owners. All prices exclude VAT E.&O.E.
© 2021 Internet Central Ltd.
sales@ic.co.uk
