Case study
Ekelmans Advocaten
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The customer
Ekelmans Advocaten (EA) is a high-end law firm in the Netherlands. The company employs circa 140 professionals and 30 support staff.
The challenge
EA’s digital workplace was based on Remote Desktop Services (RDS). The on-premise infrastructure was dated and key components were coming out of support. The office LAN and WLAN network and the office telephony also needed to be modernised.
In addition to these lifecycle issues, users experienced a poor performance of the RDS workplace. Furthermore, as the end-user terminals were all thin clients, professionals who worked from home had to use their private computers or temporary company laptops with a VPN connection. In addition, EA used Office 2016 while many clients expected to communicate with Microsoft Teams. Finally, the document management system was running on an old software version and exhibited many bugs that could be resolved by applying updates. However, these were dependent on newer versions of Office.
Given all these accumulating challenges, EA concluded that it needed to move to a new solution. The company was also looking for a new partner who was willing and capable of translating its business needs into high quality cost-effective IT solutions. After implementation, this partner would play the role of an IT orchestrator and continue supporting EA when further IT choices have to be made and implemented.
The solution
After a careful selection process, EA chose Cambrian due to its track record of delivering increased flexibility, security and quality at competitive cost.
As a first step, we helped EA evaluate a number of possible workplace configurations. After a Proof of Concept (PoC), EA decided to move to a new IT environment consisting of AWS and Microsoft cloud services. With AWS Workspaces as the central Desktop-as-a-Service solution, complemented with several other AWS services. This is combined with Microsoft 365 services for communication, collaboration, identity and device management.
Macbook Air computers were selected for the professionals and Dell Wyse zero client laptops for the support staff. A Cisco Meraki network was implemented for LAN and WLAN. Finally, a VoIP cloud telephony solution replaced the aging on premise system.
In addition, a service management tool by 4Me was introduced, allowing users to manage their own tickets and requests directly. Several key users were given access to various Cambrian automations, in order to allow the organisation to process requests fast and efficiently, without the involvement of any IT services provider.
The results
The transformation project was completed in five months; from the configuration and evaluation of options to completing the migrations and user training.
The major benefits realised were:
- Users can now work securely from any place with managed laptops without VPN.
- Performance problems are eliminated, because the AWS Workspaces provide dedicated and fit-for-purpose hardware per user.
- Microsoft 365 offers modern collaboration capabilities and the use of Teams.
- The document management system can be updated to resolve existing bugs.
- Security is strengthened, data remains centrally and MFA has been implemented.
- The LAN & WLAN network is renewed with a shift from ethernet to Wifi based connectivity for the laptops. This has led to a significant cost reduction.
- The new cloud VoiP telephony solution offers integration possibilities for mobile phones.
- A scalable, secure and compliant environment is in place with disaster recovery capability, all of which is managed cost efficiently.
- Service requests are processed much faster and very efficiently.
A comprehensive and detailed SLA safeguards quality and compliance, and is combined with a services monitoring system available to the users. Cambrian continues to support EA by optimising service management processes and helping modernise the business applications landscape.
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