When premier New Zealand law firm Mayne Wetherell’s on-premise servers hit end of life, they had two options: Invest in new servers or find a new way of running their IT.
A Kinetics FlightPlan best practice IT review shone a light on the company’s stakeholder obligations and highlighted their business goals and priorities, enabling us to create an IT strategy aligned to their business goals, with the stakeholder obligations guiding the prioritisation of activities and helping set IT policies.
In Mayne Wetherell’s case those stakeholder obligations were around the sharing of information, privacy, customer privilege documentation, cybersecurity and the protection against data breaches.
With the FlightPlan providing a helicopter view of their business needs and obligations, the decision to move to a hybrid cloud model, utilising Azure cloud was an easy one.
Azure provides the company with the business continuity protection, resilience and Azure Active Directory enhanced security features including multifactor authentication, the company needed. It’s also providing all the flexibility we’ve come to expect from cloud services – invaluable when, like Mayne Wetherell, you have fluctuating staff numbers due to summer interns and a successful graduate programme.
Aligning business and IT with a helicopter view
The project with Mayne Wetherell has been highly successful, with the company’s staff embracing the new system. But if you’ve ever had a great IT plan and rolled it out, only to struggle to get users to adopt the new system or process or for the business to fully buy-in to the change, you’ll know that’s not a given.
Here at Kinetics there have been plenty of times when we’ve been called in to help companies whose previous provider has done a good job rolling out an IT system or process, but that process hasn’t been fully aligned with the business and user needs, and there hasn’t been a change management plan to encourage adoption. As a result users haven’t fully bought into the changes that the new system or process should bring and the company has failed to reap the benefits of their investment – and we’ve been called on to provide the required change management component.
That’s why our FlightPlan best practice IT review service is such a critical part of our IT engagements. It’s tightly aligned to your business strategy and provides a helicopter view of your business from an IT perspective, and helps you reimagine and remap what you should be doing with IT to propel your business forward.
Review your business goals, Reimagine what is possible, Remap your path to success
FlightPlan enables your business to answer the critical questions of where you currently are, where you want to go, and how to use IT to get there.
Interviewing key stakeholders in the business – not just the IT team, but within the wider business (in Mayne Wetherell’s case, that included practice managers and senior partners) – and gathering data from your systems provides an overview of your current IT and your business goals and priorities.
Now we’ve identified your business priorities, you can set a plan to get there, leveraging different technologies to propel your business forward, engage you staff and strengthen your security posture.
And because your business needs and goals change, we revisit FlightPlan regularly to ensure you’re always well placed to navigate changes in technology.
Flightplan in action
FlightPlan considered a number of key benefits pertaining to Azure migration, all of which feed into Mayne Wetherell’s business requirements.
– Security
Kinetics customers, including Mayne Wetherell, routinely place security as the number one requirement for a cloud-based service and Azure is one of the most secure platforms available.
Microsoft regularly detects up to two million attempts a day to compromise its systems. Azure doesn’t just fend off those attacks. It also learns from them so it can provide the best and most up to date security system to every Azure customer.
Azure also has the ability to back up your data in different locations around the globe to ensure that if one data centre does ever go down, your data is safe, backed-up and available via another data centre.
For Mayne Wetherell the robust security and backup protection met the company’s stakeholder obligations on the protection and security front.
– Scalability
With Azure you can simply add or remove more computing power as and when you need it. It really is that simple. Azure will also keep track of the traffic associated with your solution/project and can automatically adjust to meet your needs if you’d like it to do that. It’s an ability that enables Mayne Wetherell to quickly and easily scale up their systems to cope with the summer interns and graduates, and then just as easily scale down systems when the season ends, paying only for what they need.
– Data insight and visibility
The constant flow of data from your system will all be tracked in Azure and Kinetics has the skills to help you visualise this data using tools like PowerBI.
It’s an option which enables you to make the best decisions based on real time data. In Mayne Wetherell’s case, it’s unlocking a wealth of data from legal practice software, and enabling the company to see how the business is performing and where any bottlenecks are – and enabling them to make changes to quickly address any issues.
If you’re ready to identify ‘where to next’ for your business and your IT plan, contact Kinetics and if you’d like to read more about Mayne Wetherell’s transition to Azure cloud, click here….
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