Norton Peskett Solicitors
Norton Peskett are a well respected firm advising clients for over 180 years.
Cloud Geeni provide a private cloud infrastructure to 120 end users across the firm after managing a full cloud migration.
As a well-respected legal firm with a deep-rooted heritage, Norton Peskett solicitors have been providing legal services to businesses and individuals in the East Anglia area for over 180 years.
From the company’s humble beginnings in the 1830’s through to present day with over hundred staff across six locations, Norton Peskett have weathered many storms to become a highly respected firm.
Combining the firm’s rich heritage with a need for digital transformation, Norton Peskett made the decision to drive operational excellence through cloud migration embarking on a search for a suitable managed service provider in 2019.
This transpired to be an astute business decision with the effects of the global pandemic just around the corner.
What was the main driver behind the decision to adopt the Cloud?
With on premise Zen servers coming to the end of their life, this presented an optimal time to adopt a more streamlined infrastructure and move away from an on-premise Citrix environment built by a third-party provider.
This set up proved to be expensive to replace and difficult to support coupled with the complexity of offering remote working to their staff through the current setup, it was time for the firm to make a change.
What made you chose Cloud Geeni as your managed service provider?
After an initial meeting with Cloud Geeni’s Sales Director and visits to existing legal clients already on the Cloud Geeni platform, it was evident that the solution would simplify Norton Peskett’s current set up offering increased security and enhancing performance.
The CEO, IT Director and Senior Partner at the firm also visited Cloud Geeni’s UK based ISO27001 accredited Data Centres demonstrating a tangible security protocol that could not be achieved internally.
Speaking with existing customers and hearing positive reviews also helped to affirm the decision that Cloud migration was the correct infrastructure upgrade for the business, coupled with meeting the technical support team at head office, it was clear that Cloud Geeni could facilitate a smooth adoption with minimum downtime.
The practicalities of migrating to the Cloud
Cloud Geeni were able to create a test environment to run applications providing a server infrastructure to facilitate in depth testing before the final migration.
This provided Norton Peskett with the assurance that existing software and applications would perform to an optimized standard via the cloud environment and the end user experience would be significantly enhanced.
A comprehensive Microsoft Office 365 tenant was configured providing all Microsoft application licences for the firm enabling full use of Microsoft collaboration tools that were not previously accessible.
Removing the requirement for multiple VPNs via a complicated and difficult to maintain Citrix environment reallocated the resource of the internal IT team allowing a renewed focus on supporting the end user experience which in turn equates to increased productivity across the firm.
With new capabilities to implement remote working it was now essential to adopt robust security practices.
Cloud Geeni’s partnership and accreditation with Mimecast allowed Norton Peskett to enhance security for email and messaging. Coupled with Microsoft Authenticator for Office 365 providing a second secure layer of protection when logging onto the infrastructure from a remote device.
Cloud Infrastructure and the pandemic
Cloud migration before the pandemic shook the world allowed Norton Peskett to seamlessly shift the day-to-day operations of the firm to a remote environment without disruption.
“Looking back at this time last year none of us could have anticipated this unprecedented situation.
Since March 2020 I have had to manage the IT department on my own and I could not have done this had the firm not migrated to a Cloud platform in the previous year, a big thank you to the Cloud Geeni team for their help and patience.”