A Christchurch law firm wanted better IT support but their biggest concern was changing providers

After the handover we worked through our managed-services onboarding review, which covers close to 100 checks across Microsoft 365, user accounts, licensing, backups, security, devices, networking, documentation and the other parts of the environment we need to understand before taking responsibility for it.

Some of those checks are technical and others are fairly mundane, but both have a habit of uncovering things that have been assumed to be working for years. We do not accept that a backup is fine because there is a backup product listed somewhere, and we do not assume that Microsoft 365 licensing is correct because everybody can open Outlook.

In this case, those checks found several things that needed attention.

There was a third-party backup service in place, so at first glance the firm appeared to have an additional copy of its information available if something went wrong.

When we checked it, the backup was disconnected.

It had not been tested either, which meant there was no reliable way of knowing how long it had been in that state or whether the firm would have been able to recover its information if the backup had been needed during that period.

For a law firm holding years of client correspondence, matter documents and other business information, we were not comfortable leaving that unresolved. The backup service was reconnected and backup testing became part of the ongoing management of the environment.

It is one of the reasons the onboarding review goes into considerably more detail than collecting passwords and installing our management software. Had we accepted the existing setup at face value, everybody could have continued believing there was a working backup until the day somebody needed to restore from it.

Microsoft 365 licensing had developed into another problem.

Most of the users were underlicensed for the services the firm was using. Some were missing functionality that would have been useful to them, while other services were being used in a licensing grey area where the user only held part of the licensing required for the way the service had been configured.

We went through the users, the services they needed and the Microsoft 365 features already being used across the firm, then corrected the licensing position and brought the accounts onto a more consistent setup.

Licensing can become messy surprisingly quickly as people join and leave, Microsoft changes its products and somebody adds a licence to solve the immediate requirement without revisiting the wider environment. Left alone for long enough, five users can easily end up with five slightly different configurations.

The firm’s security was fairly basic when we took over, with conventional antivirus providing much of the protection on the computers and limited controls elsewhere in the environment.

We started with the areas that needed attention first and then continued improving the security setup as part of the wider management of the firm’s IT. Over time that has included stronger protection around the computers themselves, email, identity, web access, patching, backups and staff security awareness.

There was already enough happening during the provider transition without turning the first few weeks into a wholesale replacement of every system the firm used. We dealt with the more important gaps early, while other changes were planned around the equipment they already owned, licensing changes and the normal cycle of replacing technology.

That work has continued throughout the relationship rather than being treated as an onboarding exercise that finished once the initial list had been cleared.

The concern the partner had at the beginning is one we hear from other firms as well. Even when the current arrangement is frustrating, changing provider means transferring access, documentation and knowledge that may have accumulated over many years, and nobody wants that process to interfere with staff who still have clients and deadlines to deal with.

A good handover still requires questions to be answered and there will normally be points where the client needs to be involved. What it should not require is for a partner or practice manager to coordinate the technical work between the incoming and outgoing providers.

In this case the partner wanted considerably more visibility at the start, then stepped back once he was confident the process was under control. Four years later, his involvement in routine IT is a fraction of what it was when we first met.

If you are spending too much time following up your IT provider, support has become harder work than it should be, or the thought of changing provider is the main reason you have stayed where you are, we are happy to talk through what a handover would involve.