Heckford Norton – Case study

Client – Heckford Norton Solicitors – legal firm – 3 offices – 40 staff

Objectives – replace old servers, implement offsite backup, new on-premise email system, single integrated system for three offices

Heckford Norton solicitors are an established legal firm with offices in Hertfordshire and Essex. They rely heavily on their IT infrastructure to manage and run their business. When some of their servers were reaching the end of their life they approached 4Cambridge about upgrading their systems. 4Cambridge business IT support reviewed their requirements, then put together a plan to install new servers and migrate the firm across from their legacy systems.

The new systems are based on a VMWare virtualisation platform, which allowed for greater efficiency and consolidation of resources. This meant that only two new physical servers were required to replace the original four, whilst more than doubling capacity and performance.

All the firms files were transferred across from the old systems, and the moves were carried out with no downtime for Heckford Norton. 4Cambridge also implemented on on-premise install of Microsoft Exchange server, and migrated all of the firm’s email across from their legacy systems.

Two Windows 2012 R2 virtual servers were configured as remote desktop servers, and all of the firms applications were installed on these. New Microsoft Office licences were also purchased, allowing Heckford Norton’s staff to move onto the latest version of Office. This allowed all three sites to operate on the same environment, providing a consistent experience for staff wherever they are working. And it provides the ability to securely work remotely when not in the office, without client data being copied offsite to personal devices.

4Cambridge deployed Veeam Backup & Replication to protect the firm’s data, backing up both to local storage and a second copy offsite. This ensures the ability to recover data quickly and efficiently should the need arise.

Since successfully completing the migration 4Cambridge now provide full support of the systems, and helpdesk support for staff across the three sites.

“We are delighted with the new servers and the work done by 4Cambridge” says David Pidgeon, Partner at Heckford Norton. “We knew we needed to improve our systems, and we now have a reliable, stable solution to work on.”