A collaborative approach to growth and transformation
Martin Holmes, head of IT at Harrison Drury, discusses key phases of his cloud migration journey undertaken in partnership with Cloud Geeni.
Harrison Drury is an award-winning SME law firm with a strong borough presence in the north-west of England. With five offices across the region, Harrison Drury focus on providing an industry leading service to their clients, with a specific focus on community advocation regularly hosting events and charity fundraisers throughout the north-west.
What was the main driver behind the decision to adopt the cloud?
With a desire to completely remove on-premise IT infrastructure from the business, such as servers approaching their end of life, Harrison Drury required their internal IT systems to provide an outstanding experience for both clients and end users while facilitating rapid business growth.
As Martin Holmes, the head of IT infrastructure for the firm reflects: “The biggest IT challenge we faced was the continuation of our desire to grow and improve our IT services, both for our staff and our clients.”
After initial meetings and a full audit of the current IT setup across the business, Cloud Geeni were able to present a proposal of services to the board of directors for the firm.
What made Harrison Drury choose Cloud Geeni as their managed service provider?
Lee Fowkes, senior account manager for Cloud Geeni says, “There were two main reasons Harrison Drury chose Cloud Geeni. We could explain confidently how we could implement the migration and maintain an infrastructure for 120 users, in a language that was understood by non-IT personnel. The second was the relationship built over the sales process.”
Cloud Geeni work closely and collaboratively with prospective clients, focusing on the end user experience and the ways in which adopting the cloud could allow a business to achieve its specific objectives.
“We worked for several months to get to a position where both parties felt comfortable – we weren’t the cheapest and we weren’t the most expensive, but we could clearly show value and the support needed to give Harrison Drury the confidence to sign off the proposal.”
The practicalities of cloud migration
Harrison Drury settled on a full DaaS service with all data and infrastructure managed with Cloud Geeni through our private cloud platform and UK data centres.
Cloud Geeni’s fully managed private cloud platform enables Harrison Drury’s employees access to their files and desktops from any internet enabled device. For a legal firm, this functionality naturally impacts billable hours and productivity.
The timing of the migration from on-premise servers to the cloud largely impacted the firm’s ability to provide services without hesitation to its clients throughout the pandemic as all staff have the ability to work remotely.
As Martin Holmes reflects, “Without cloud computing we would have not been able to deliver our services to our clients continuously and without issue. Our business was not affected in its capacity to deliver services due to the pandemic.”
As a trusted managed service provider to the Legal sector for over three decades, Cloud Geeni are well positioned to facilitate a fully compliant migration to firms in this heavily regulated industry, understanding the complexities of data security while simultaneously offering ongoing end-user support and continuous security audits.
When asked if he would be happy to recommend Cloud Geeni to legal professionals, Martin Holmes, head of IT for Harrison Drury responded, “Without question, Cloud Geeni provide a fantastic service.”
