Case Study: Bringing A Law Firm Into Cloud Computing

Fairdinkum was challenged with helping a law firm client transition from their old IT infrastructure to modern cloud computing. In addition to helping set up the client’s cloud presence, Fairdinkum had to manage all the client’s devices. The client also needed to migrate their email system and files to the cloud. During this project, Fairdinkum was able to help the client fully onboard onto cloud computing and exploit the cloud’s bandwidth by facilitating collaboration and establish the client’s data infrastructure.

There were several initial obstacles that Fairdinkum aided the client with. First, the client was using an old Mozilla Thunderbird email system for all their communication efforts internally and externally. Thunderbird is not an ideal communication platform, especially for law firms that share and collaborate on many files with customers and colleagues. This meant that the client’s complete email system needed to be migrated to the cloud. Also, the client’s data was on unstable SANs across multiple virtual servers. This led to storage files being corrupted and there were issues with cloud file sharing. This can be extremely problematic because of the sensitive nature of law clients’ data and files need to be shared frequently. Lastly, the entire data infrastructure–firewalls, switches and servers–needed to be updated in addition to moving to a new office.

To establish the client’s collaboration and sharing capacity online, Fairdinkum setup safe online workflows and online collaboration for the client. This allowed the client to securely share and collaborate on sensitive data with external firms. This file sharing hybrid model allowed the firm to manage security controls and have cloud flexibility. Although the client had the cloud as backup for data, Fairdinkum implemented disaster recovery protocols for an extra layer of security. This gives the firm additional backup in the case of a physical or virtual disaster happening to their data. Also, Fairdinkum migrated the client’s previous Thunderbird email system to Microsoft M365. With Microsoft M365, the client experienced faster and more secure email communications while enjoying the additional office applications that accompanied Microsoft M365. This new improved email system and data infrastructure provided by Fairdinkum allowed for the client to easily comply with GDPR guidelines for PII. Maintaining GDPR compliance for PII was crucial for the firm because they handled so much personal client data; this allowed them to easily maintain and fix any compliance issues.  By using the cloud’s infrastructure, Fairdinkum was able to manage all the client’s devices to ensure the security of all of the client’s data.