OREANDA-NEWS. August 9, 2012. Fujitsu announced it has been appointed by Freehills to provide Hosted Services in its Australian data centres for the firm's business-critical e-discovery applications.

Freehills is an Australian-based international law firm with offices in Australia and Singapore. Its network of 1,200 lawyers undertakes high-level legal work for clients on every continent. When Freehills merges with Herbert Smith, a leading law firm in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and UK, to form Herbert Smith Freehills later this year, it will become the world's eighth largest law firm based on total lawyer numbers, with 2,800 lawyers, 460 partners and 20 offices.

Fujitsu's winning Hosted Services bid will see it provide hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for Freehills' e-discovery application out of a local Fujitsu data centre. Fujitsu will provide management up to and including the operating system layer, including patching, anti-virus and monitoring environment services, and a link to Freehills’ existing co-location environment at a second Australian Fujitsu data centre.

The appointment builds on Fujitsu's existing successful relationship with Freehills, where it has provided co-location services to Freehills for the past three years.

Freehills previously managed its e-discovery application on-site. The capabilities and scalability of the local Fujitsu data centre and hosted services platform solution will provide it with greater resilience, flexibility and service levels than could be achieved internally.

In particular, the IaaS platform will enable Freehills to easily and efficiently scale its storage up or down as required in response to data volatility in e-discovery, as well as manage its growing infrastructure needs as an expanding organisation.

Gary Adler, Enterprise Technology Manager of Freehills, said "Following the tender process, Fujitsu was ideally suited to our needs based on their strong global presence, both flexible and mature hosted services offering and our already very positive experience with the existing co-location arrangement. The agreement with Fujitsu also complements our longer term infrastructure strategy, placing us in a good position to leverage their economies of scale."

Mike Foster, CEO of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand, said: "We are pleased that Freehills, a major international legal firm, has chosen our platform to host its important business applications. We saw the opportunity and invested in this infrastructure in Australia early and created a platform that is able to satisfy our clients' stringent demands for availability, privacy, security and data sovereignty. We look forward to supporting Freehills' needs now and in the future with our secure, flexible and scalable hosted services platform."