Small law firm

About the Client

The customer is a law firm with about 15 users. Its users work on-site, but often continue to work from home. The firm had an on-site server deployment that was composed of about four physical servers residing in a server closet. Being a law firm, the business documented all correspondence and notes, resulting in a very large amount of data. They topped out around 500GB, including software applications. Their servers hosted multiple applications including Worldox for document management, QuickBooks for accounting, Timeslips for time tracking, Legal Solutions, Phillips SpeechExec Pro for dictation software, Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and Adobe Acrobat. These software applications needed to be available for each user.

Pain Points

The law firm had a poorly managed IT environment, with in-house servers that crashed multiple times and no robust power backup solution. It also faced a lack of support and redundancy, and out-of-date software and hardware that was in desperate need of a refresh. The customer had a mail server in-house, but lost access to email every time the Internet went down. There was also a lack of reliable remote connectivity, which was especially frustrating as users were confined to their desktop computers and couldn’t experience the necessary mobility.

Opportunity

After being introduced to the opportunity through a sales partner, RapidScale’s team of experts analyzed the customer’s needs and proposed a full reconstruction of the infrastructure and the way the network was structured. The customer was extremely adamant about finding a solution that would allow users the flexibility to work from the office or anywhere else.

Solution

RapidScale presented the client with a solution to address their pain points, proposing CloudServer, CloudDesktop. They began with CloudServer for Infrastructure as a Service, which moved all the customer’s servers out of the server closet and into RapidScale’s state-of-the-art Tier 3, Class 1 data centers. This allowed all connectivity to come from the data center, which provided a 100% uptime guarantee while allowing the firm to use its bandwidth for work needs, instead of using it to try and connect to the servers.

Next, RapidScale implemented virtual desktops, using the CloudDesktop solution, which came pre-loaded with virtualized software and the ability to designate programs to the users that needed access to them. This eliminated the need for the client to ever worry about software refresh in the future, as RapidScale tests and deploys software updates as they become available. With CloudDesktop, the virtual desktops are available universally, from any device, in any location. The dedicated environment also allowed the client’s network to recognize the virtual desktops as if they were local machines, which made printing and networking a breeze and gave the option for remote working. Replacing physical desktop machines with Thin and Zero Clients saved the client an immense amount of money on refreshing out-of-date hardware.

Finally, RapidScale established a public CloudMail (Hosted Microsoft Exchange) solution that allowed the client’s users to access email from any device, without having to rely on the in-office Internet connection.