BELMONT, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 16, 2011) - Actiance (www.actiance.com), enablers of the safe and compliant use of unified communications, collaboration and Web 2.0, announced today that MacRoberts LLP, one of Scotland's preeminent commercial law firms, uses Vantage from Actiance to protect its deployment of unified communications (UC) platform Microsoft Lync.
With offices in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, MacRoberts provides a full range of legal services to leading UK and international businesses, financial institutions, public sector organisations and private individuals.
For solicitors such as MacRoberts, unified communications offers an efficient and effective means of communication. However, the benefits of UC can be quickly offset if care is not taken to meet the security, management and compliance issues created when deploying a UC platform as Robert Crichton, Director of IT Services at MacRoberts explains.
"We have an extensive corporate data and IT infrastructure that is critical to our business. Any organisation must take data leakage seriously, but for a firm of solicitors it's more than a loss of reputation at stake," says Crichton. "Lawyers exchange documents all the time. In order to ensure compliance and fulfil our legal obligations we need to be able to prove irrefutably what was exchanged, who with and when, regardless of the medium used. If an investigation was launched into a particular document and we couldn't easily demonstrate who had access, it may weaken our client's position and that's simply not acceptable."
Whilst Microsoft Lync is extremely effective in delivering UC, it did not natively provide the capabilities to meet all of today's security, compliance and legislative requirements defined by MacRoberts. The law firm needed to ensure that the implementation of a UC platform did not open up its IT infrastructure to the threat of malware coming in or the risk of data leaking out. In addition, MacRoberts wanted to be certain that only authorised applications were used and that services such as public IM (Yahoo, AOL etc) were blocked.
Advised by Gradian, one of MacRoberts preferred technology suppliers, the law firm deployed Vantage. Actiance's award winning security, management and compliance platform that protects not just UC, but all real-time communications used within an organisation -- from presence and instant messaging to conferencing and voice.
"One of the reasons we wanted to introduce UC into the firm was to enable us to federate with our clients, enabling a more productive and efficient collaborative environment where meetings could take place without leaving the desk. Vantage has enabled us to achieve this without exposing ourselves to the risk of data leakage or inbound threats such as malware and has also provided us with the reporting tools to ensure we are using Microsoft OCS to its best advantage," concludes Crichton. "I'd go so far as to say that we wouldn't have rolled out OCS or Lync without Vantage; Vantage complements Microsoft Lync by providing us with the necessary control to ensure that our data remains secure and that we have a full audit trail of all conversations and files exchanged."
About Actiance
Actiance enables the safe and productive use of Unified Communications, collaboration and Web 2.0, including blogs and social networking sites. Formerly FaceTime Communications, Actiance's award-winning platforms are used by 9 of the top 10 US banks and more than 1,600 organizations globally for the security, management and compliance of unified communications, Web 2.0 and social media channels. Actiance supports all leading social networks, unified communications providers and IM platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter AOL, Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco.
Actiance is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information visit http://www.actiance.com or call 1-888-349-3223.