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Case

Empowering professionals with managed solutions and managed services

Van Benthem & Keulen (VB&K), a prestigious law and notary firm in the Netherlands, needed to modernize its IT environment and transition to a new digital workplace. Cambrian assisted VB&K in evaluating several potential scenarios and configurations. Once the firm selected a configuration, the transformation project was completed within five months, covering everything from the evaluation of options to the migration and user onboarding. In addition, VB&K selected Cambrian’s Managed Services offering to operate, support and continue to optimize their IT, based on SLAs and compliant with their security standards.

“We contracted Cambrian to overhaul our IT infrastructure. They pay close attention to the wishes of the customer and keep a sharp eye on costs. The Cambrian team is able to move quickly with ample commitment from their management team.”

Johan Koggink - Managing Director VB&K

The customer

Van Benthem & Keulen (VB&K) is a high-end law and notary firm in the Netherlands. The company employs circa 140 professionals and 30 support staff.

The challenge

VB&K professionals and support staff use Microsoft Word and Outlook intensively combined with the iManage document management system. Their digital workplace was an aging on-premise environment based on Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

Users were unhappy because they experienced a poor performance of the RDS workplace. Furthermore, as the end-user terminals were all desktop thin clients, professionals who worked from home had to use their own private computers or temporary company laptops and build a VPN connection to the office to reach the RDS workplace.

In addition to these problems, VB&K used Office packaged in their RDS stack while many of its clients used Microsoft 365 and expected to meet using Microsoft Teams. 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. Several other key IT components were coming out of support and required big investments in hardware and software.

Given all these accumulating challenges, VB&K concluded that it needed to modernise its IT environment and move to a new digital workplace. They formulated the following main requirements:

Users can work from any place, on any device.
Users are provided with secure, managed laptop devices.
Data remains centrally, not on individual devices, and access is protected via MFA.
Microsoft Office 365 including Teams gets implemented.
The document management system iManage gets updated.
The partner responsible for the modernization should also provide managed services.

The solution

Cambrian helped VB&K evaluate a number of possible workplace configurations. A Proof of Concept (PoC) was organized for Amazon AppStream 2.0 and for Amazon Workspaces with various end-user devices: Macs, Chromebooks, Windows PCs and zero-clients. These were evaluated against a set of criteria:

Easy switching between applications and between windows within one application.
Use of multiple screens.
Use of video conferencing via Microsoft Teams.
Use of USB authentication keys to log into the Dutch land registry and the chamber of commerce.
Use of a USB foot pedal in combination with the transcription application BigFoot.

The results

The transformation project was completed in five months; from the configuration and evaluation of options to completing the migration and user training and onboarding. This period was also used to onboard Cambrian’s managed services.

The major benefits realized are:

All users have laptops facilitating flexible working; without ethernet cables, at any location and any piece of furniture.
The central workplaces can be reached securely from any place and any device with no need of a VPN.
Microsoft 365 is enabling modern collaboration, including the use of Teams.
The structural performance problems are eliminated: Amazon Workspaces provides dedicated, fit-for-purpose hardware per user.
End-user devices are centrally managed; Macs, Dell zero clients and company iPhones.
Security has been strengthened: data remains encrypted and MFA has been implemented for all central systems.
Microsoft 365 client access policies ensure that company data is only downloaded on managed devices.
The LAN & WLAN network is renewed with a shift from ethernet to Wifi based connectivity. This has led to a significant cost reduction.
The new cloud VoiP telephony solution offers the possibility to integrate with mobile phones.
High availability for the infrastructure with minimal effort by using the out of the box facilities offered by AWS and Microsoft 365.

Cambrian’s managed services provide remote support for the IT environment and the users, and orchestrate third party service providers:

The modernized IT infrastructure is resilient, scalable and secure.
The HA architecture, combined with improved observability and ITSM processes reduced IT related issues to a rare phenomenon.
Automated workflows ensure that service issues and requests are processed efficiently and much faster.
A comprehensive and detailed SLA safeguards performance and quality.
Our ISO 27001 certified Managed Services provide the necessary controls to ensure and demonstrate compliance with data protection and information security standards and regulations.

> If you want to learn more about the transition at VB&K, read the VB&K Strategy & Implementation case.

> Click here to learn more about our ‘next-gen AWS Managed Services‘.