EBL Miller Rosenfalck

Azure Case Study

The Business

EBL Miller Rosenfalck are a European Business Law firm who deliver a high quality service to clients all around the globe with particularly deep knowledge around cross border issues. They are headquartered in London, but work throughout the UK and Europe.

The Challenge

Due to Windows 2008 Server reaching end of life at the beginning of 2020, Miller Rosenfalck had already moved from an on-premise infrastructure into Azure through another provider.

Over time it was evident there were gaps in the provider’s technical knowledge and there were also concerns about fluctuating pricing. When lockdown hit, like most companies, everyone at Miller Rosenfalck began working from home meaning their infrastructure had to be scaled up significantly to accomodate this. This included a Remote Desktop Server which was initially built for just a few users. With a platform such as Azure, this increase in usage should’ve been seamless but was proving to be problematic.

To compound previous concerns with their provider, staff were getting more and more frustrated as they struggled to resolve performance issues and costs were spiralling out of control.

Members of the Miller Rosenfalck team had previously attended Risc IT’s London based free educational security seminars, so decided to reach out to us for support.

The Solution

The initial scope of working with Miller Rosenfalck was to help them understand what they had and what was going wrong with their infrastructure.

This allowed us to take stock of everything and fully understand the cause of their issues, resulting in actionable recommendations in how they can improve costs, security and performance. Following this consultation period, the company decided to expand our remit to not only implement recommendations but to improve their security across their entire IT estate, covered in our Risc Total Support package.

To address immediate performance and cost issues, we moved their Remote Desktop Server to a more suitable server which had double the RAM, and applied a Reserve Instance. This enabled everybody to work from home more easily and cut costs dramatically.

To address security issues, all Office 365 licences were upgraded so consistent security policies could be enforced both on-premise and in the Cloud. Also single sign-on, multifactor authentication and secure password policies were rolled out across the entire orginisation.

To mitigate against disasters, Redstor Cloud Backup was installed, meaning that if something does go wrong, business critical data can easily be restored regardless of where you’re working from.

Total Support

Risc Total Support is our premium, all inclusive service where we ensure your Security and Productivity services run at their optimum.

  • Deployment & Configuration of services
  • Management of services
  • Monitoring of Microsoft 365 security
  • Backup of Office 365 data
  • Endpoint Protection
  • Proactive monitoring of PCs, Laptops, Servers, Printers and Routers

Some services incur additional costs depending on factors such as required licenses or volume of company data.

Understanding Azure Costing Models

Azure is charged by the second on a ‘pay as you go’ basis. However, if your infrastructure is long-term and stays relatively stable, you can ‘reserve’ your Virtual Machines for 12 or 36 months giving you huge discounts of up to 60%. This is essentially committing to pay for that server for the specified length of time and is called a ‘Reserved Instance’.

What Risc typically do is show a customer what the ‘pay as you go’ costs will be for an initial period of one or two weeks. Following that, we have a proof of concept period where the allocated resources will be measured to ensure adequate performance and suitability. At the stage where everything is running perfectly and all parties are happy, we then commit to 12 or 36 months to apply discounts. For us, this is the right way to approach Azure.

Results

From the outset our working relationship with Miller Rosenfalck has really been about evolution rather than revolution. The decisions made by the previous provider were, in theory, the right ones, but in practice they were quickly out of their depth.

We’ve seen this many times and it’s understandable: Azure is vast, complex and can quickly get out of control if you don’t know what you’re doing. But in the right hands, it’s beautifully scalable, flexible, powerful and inexpensive. Experience counts. By understanding the cause of their issues and how to resolve them, Miller Rosenfalck are now able to work from home and in the office easily, securely and without performance or cost issues.

Furthermore, processes and systems are now in place to ensure their business is fully secure regardless of device and location. Should a disaster happen, and this could mean loss of a laptop to fire, flood or theft, their data is protected and can be restored to a new device with minimal loss of time to the business.

With continuous proactive monitoring of their systems from Risc IT, our relationship with them continues to grow. We’re proud to have helped Miller Rosenfalck and to have reaffirmed the positive experiences of the Cloud. We look forward to continuing to support them on their journey.

“After the experience of moving to the cloud with our previous supplier, we were looking for a partner that could provide a secure, flexible and cost-effective managed solution. Risc IT provide exactly that and are a partner we can trust 100%.”

Pia Dalziel – Partner, Solicitor (England & Wales) & Advokat (Denmark)

“Since we’ve been with Risc IT, everything works like magic”.

Stela Merry – Office Manager

Download

Please click the image below to download the case study locally.

If you have any further questions please reach out to us on 01492 862780 and we’ll be more than happy to help.