Platform

AWS

PohlmanUSA was founded in 1990 with a vision of how technology could enhance the deposition process while maintaining their foundation of delivering service excellence. With over 30 years of experience, PohlmanUSA provides the most accurate, reliable, and technologically advanced court reporting and litigation services.

Through their vast network of resources, impressive skills, and reliable technologies, PohlmanUSA is able to handle all types of mass tort and complex general litigation. Everything from discovery through trial comes with PohlmanUSA’s award-winning concierge level of service. They pride themselves on their ability to innovate and customize services based on their client needs and feedback.

Connectria has a longstanding relationship providing managed services and technology support for PohlmanUSA since 2015.

Challenge

PohlmanUSA’s cloud server environments had grown beyond their internal ability to manage, monitor, patch, and keep up with AWS updates and best practices. PohlmanUSA’s relationship with Connectria started with essential AWS instance support.

“Initially, Connectria was simply monitoring and supporting our AWS resources. Then they started doing the actual patching of the instances. Then we expanded our services, putting some of the architectural controls in Connectria’s hands. If we need a new server, we go to Connectria, we tell them what we want, work with them on the specifications, and they spin up any new instances in our environment,” said Alicia Hart, VP of Information Technology at PohlmanUSA.

“I don’t have any problem going to our leadership team to compare the cost of Connectria services vs. other similar providers. Sure, there are other lower-cost vendors, but that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to have downtime and other horrific issues,” said Hart.

She continues, “downtime is just not something that Pohlman can tolerate. Everything is fast-moving. 40% of everything that we book, cancels. Our industry is always on the move t and even the slightest outage is detrimental to both our company and especially our clients. And thankfully we don’t experience that with Connectria.”

PohlmanUSA’s AWS environment is constantly evolving. Connectria filled gaps in internal capability for cloud-managed and monitoring services. Now, Connectria manages PohlmanUSA’s AWS environments, maintaining all system documentation along with any interconnectivity, the devices between them, and any services on top of them in terms of elastic services and even reserved instances which also helps to maintain and manage costs.

Solution

Connectria has helped PohlmanUSA in many ways over its sustained multi-year relationship. Now, that support has been focusing more on its AWS environment and the best ways to manage and maintain compliance, costs, storage, and more.

Hart said, “a newer adventure for us within the last year, is really identifying AWS cost savings opportunities and finding ways to save on cost from either advanced reserved instances to auto expansion. The benefit of instances that automatically expand and then retract themselves when you’re not utilizing them heavily is a game changer! Connectria has helped us embrace and implement a lot of cost savings measures over the last year to really control the costs of our AWS environments. We have testing environments and other things that we only use during business hours so there’s no sense in those running overnight.”

PohlmanUSA operates in the legal space. One of the environments handles medical records which is subject to protected health information (PHI). The HIPAA Privacy Rule provides federal protections for personal health information held by covered entities and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information. PohlmanUSA collects medical record information in the litigation process. They need to be able to collect and retain that information within the parameters of PHI regulation, as well as distribute that between the necessary parties such as the law firms involved in a given case.

“We are storing massive amounts of documentation. We have recently transitioned to using AWS Key Management Services (AWS KMS). Connectria helped us transition from our dedicated encryption server environment we had previously lived on. Our primary method of storage is S3. However, we also leverage Amazon S3 Glacier storage class in one of our other environments. These are decently sized files. While we want to keep them permanently, but they’re not something that is used much after a certain period of time, so the Glacier system was a good solution for our long-term storage needs.”

Results

“Connectria makes it possible for us to be able to tap into pricing tools and understand what AWS has to offer. Their team of experts are truly incredible in terms of understanding and managing those costs which would’ve taken considerable effort internally to begin to understand, much less implement. We simply couldn’t have done that on our own,” said Hart.

She continues, “Connectria has become an extension of our team. We meet with them every week and work hand-in-hand together on every project. I honestly have to step back to realize just how they’ve risen to every occasion and continually provided the necessary level of support and attention anytime it’s needed.”

About PohlmanUSA

PohlmanUSA Court Reporting and Litigation Services is recognized nationwide as the leading provider of technology-driven court reporting and litigation services. For over 30 years, PohlmanUSA has specialized in complex multiparty litigation by creating innovative products and customized client solutions.

We are committed to delivering exceptional customer service and anticipating our clients’ needs. Whether you need a talented court reporter or videographer for a deposition in a general litigation matter, mass tort/MDL, personal injury or an asbestos case, we have a professional ready for your need nationwide.

For more information visit www.pohlmanusa.com