Babingtons Solicitors

Azure Virtual Desktop

Cloud Migration

Legal

Virtualisation

Babingtons Solicitors, with offices in Derry and Strabane, are one of the longest established legal practices in Northern Ireland, dating back to 1901.

An Overview

Babingtons Solicitors

Babingtons Solicitors, with offices in Derry and Strabane, are one of the longest established legal practices in Northern Ireland, dating back to 1901. Working with Stem Systems since 2016, the firm recently undertook a migration to newer practice management software to enhance their service offering to clients and improve internal operations.

The hardware requirements of the project necessitated a simultaneous move to new IT infrastructure in what would be two significant changes in operations for the firm – in their management software and the actual IT environment their staff would operate from. The considerations for the firm and the changeover:

Aging servers across 2 offices, consistently hitting capacity issues.
100’s of Gb of sensitive client data and case material going back to 1990’s needing preserved and transferred.
Single point of failure with head office broadband and servers (Remote Desktop. SQL, Exchange, file servers). No standby/highly-available server setup in place.

Implications:

The software provider and customer stakeholders needed the new server environment built for testing with a clone of the current data and receive ongoing changes. The data had to be accessible in the existing environment for day-to-day production during this 6-week phase.
Approximately 40 staff needed to be familiar with how to log onto the new system on changeover day and be compliant with the company’s intended security requirements.

Requirements:

No single points of failure to allow staff to continue operating without failure of server hardware or broadband connection.
A future-proof solution that didn’t require another server change in 5 years’ time.
Scalable storage for the company’s growing data needs, that didn’t need proposals, additional hardware, projects and downtime to implement.
A migration that would be transparent to the users and not interfere with their day-to-day workflow.

Our Solution:

Stem Systems has a track record of successful migrations of legal IT systems to various forms of cloud offerings. Azure Virtual Desktop was a best fit for Babingtons Solicitors – we could deploy the environment, sync ongoing changes of emails/files/SQL databases during the 6 week testing phase and give all users a preview of their desktop well in advance.

All users enrolled in multi-factor authentication policies, logged into new desktop environments and familiarised.
Almost 30 years of client documents replicated to Azure Files, the cloud equivalent of a strongroom with enhanced intra-day backup regimes, ransomware roll-back and multi-region availability within the Microsoft Cloud.
Seamless migration of Exchange mailboxes to Microsoft 365, restricted via Conditional Access policies to compliant devices and regions.
Additional broadband provision over separate circuit from existing service.
All devices dis-joined from local servers and transferred to cloud-based logins via InTune.

Outcome:

A standard desktop for users to work from, whether at each office location, home or court.
The inherent robustness of the Microsoft Azure cloud with business continuity dialled in – server restores demonstrated to take < 20 minutes, additional servers cloned and added within the same time frame. File shares can be rolled back a few hours or days with that data being visible instantly.
Additional storage instantly available via Azure Files by updating a setting in a portal with no restarts, moves or other planning.
All devices forcibly encrypted, with latest apps and updates forcibly deployed by cloud policies – no need for PC’s to be in the office to be centrally managed.
Removal of physical servers and domain controllers from both sites.
Digital dictation, Teams, payroll, bespoke printer macros and all other value-add services for the firm were scoped and migrated in the same fashion.

A significant, immeasurable cost of any migration is user downtime. Stem Systems take a ‘measure twice, cut once’ policy to all such projects to eliminate any such interruption. All users in Babingtons Solicitors were logged in and productive on the morning of changeover day. The practice now has a secure, scalable and seamless IT platform, free from single points of failure, easily upgradeable and a solid foundation for their data for potentially decades.

Services

Sectors

Babingtons Solicitors