Millar McCall Wylie - IT migration to Microsoft Azure

Azure Virtual Desktop

Cloud Migration

InTune

Legal

Voice

Millar McCall Wylie – IT migration to Microsoft Azure

Digital transformation for one of Northern Ireland’s fastest-growing law firms

Summary

Millar McCall Wylie have specialists in all aspects of law, working with private individuals right through to banks, pension funds and multi-national organisations.

The firm operated on-premises servers and a local domain supported by Stem Systems for over 10 years. A third party hosted Remote Desktop Services (RDS) platform provided their practice management system and Exchange email. Another third party provided their hosted telephony.

Problem

Disjointed support – separate support providers for local and hosted IT systems.

Hosted desktop platform was incompatible with third party applications e.g. payroll, Sharepoint, Teams and phone system management. Staff often had to work locally, outside of the hosted desktop adding to support overhead.

On-site server issues would sometimes cause difficulties reaching the hosted desktop.

Hosted phone system experienced platform-wide outages for hours at a time. Network switches for phones and IT supported by separate providers.

The Brief

MMW required a ground-up re-design of their working IT environment. Stem Systems were enlisted to:

Build and migrate a new cloud desktop solution to replace the legacy RDS environment.

Remove on-site servers from both offices.

Build and migrate to a new hosted phone system.

Standardise the IT and phone networks into a single manageable stack.

Requirements

Seamless, un-compromised remote working – users should not have to work outside of their hosted desktop for their phone system app, digital dictation and Teams meetings.

Scalability – company staff count had grown 60% in less than 4 years, with IT storage growing accordingly. The solution had to grow with them, without needing projects, additional hardware and downtime to deliver extra storage and compute in future.

Phone system – the telephony hardware was only 3 years old so it was prudent to adopt this existing kit into a new system. Some users also wanted to avail of mobile apps or headsets to replace their physical desk phones altogether.
A migration that would be transparent to the users and not interfere with their day-to-day workflow.

Our solution

Stem Systems carefully migrated over 2 terabytes of practice management data, client files, personal documents and email stores to a new IT platform based on Microsoft 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop.

All devices dis-joined from the dependency on local servers and transferred to cloud-based logins via Microsoft Entra ID and InTune

Removal of physical servers and domain controllers from both sites.

A standard Windows 11 hosted desktop was provided for users to work from, whether at office locations, home or court. This included full functionality with Teams calls and wireless headsets.

A new cloud-managed network switch stack allowed IT, guest and phone networks to co-exist on VLAN’s (separate internal networks).

All users were logged in and productive on changeover morning with appropriate 2-factor protection already enrolled, devices secured and cloud accounts locked down by Microsoft 365 Conditional Access.

Phone system ported seamlessly, with users able to sign into their 3CX softphone and mobile apps with their Microsoft 365 credentials.

Outcome

As per our usual remit, this migration completed with no downtime of any IT function for the client. All staff have a single 2-factor protected logon for their local machine, cloud desktop and phone extension.

This project demonstrates our full stack IT offering and breadth of professional services. From network design to Azure buildout, careful migration, telephony provision, to layering of security with email filtering, automatic device encryption and tightened Conditional Access policies – MMW have one point of contact with Stem Systems and a seamless support experience on-going. The firm has a secure, scalable IT platform to see them through decades of future growth.

Stem Systems have been our trusted IT partner for many years. MMW are going through an exciting period of growth and it's great to have a technology provider to underpin this. We are serving an ever-increasing client base and Microsoft Azure gives us the confidence that we can be available for them.

Christopher McCandless, CEO,

Millar McCall Wylie