Learnings from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake have helped inform new technology and business interruption initiatives at trans-Tasman firm Duncan Cotterill.

The firm’s lawyers, who are spread across five offices in Australia and New Zealand, had limited access to files in the period immediately following the closure of the Christchurch CBD. The firm has now announced an investment in cloud-based solutions, XenApp and XenDesktop from Citrix, which allow a completely mobile working environment for the firm’s lawyers.

“We also significantly improved our business continuity by ensuring each office was redundantly connected to our centralised data centre.  We then took additional measures to replicate this data centre in real time to a secondary data centre in a different city. If any natural disaster occurs we can still meet the needs of our clients, regardless of where they are located,” said Duncan Cotterill IT Manager, Roger Sillars.