Azure solution for Debenhams Ottaway Solicitors


Rightly proud of its heritage, the firm nonetheless constantly evolves the service it offers and invests in the important role technology plays in ensuring it remains a leading, modern, client-focussed law firm.
For individuals, families and businesses, Debenhams Ottaway provides a wide range of traditional legal services including award winning private wealth services including wills, trusts, legacy planning and inheritance matters, as well as commercial property, company services, employment, PI, litigation and dispute resolution.
Consultants make the pitch
We had started our response to the firm’s stated needs through a detailed review of the existing IT systems and infrastructure so as to better understand the motivations for change.
Following the presentation of our findings, we investigated the availability of much larger bandwidth lines into both of Debenhams Ottaway’s offices and found surprisingly attractive options.
The potential to utilise Azure ExpressRoutes helped us devise a solution around providing ‘fat client’ services to the Microsoft cloud, using standard Windows 10 clients and so we supplied a hardware mix of workstations and Microsoft Surface Pro’s.

Our solution was shaped by Debenhams Ottaway’s requirement to have as little infrastructure as possible onsite, given the fact that the benefits of remote hosting would improve in the medium term.
Speed a major factor
Having settled on an Azure cloud-based solution, we established an Azure ExpressRoute to reduce latency. This allows Azure to become an extension of the Debenhams Ottaway internal network, removing the need to run in a thin-client setup.
Through liaising with Peppermint, we had already established that by moving the processing back to the desktop, we could dramatically improve the user experience, with document loading times down to just a couple of seconds from minutes.
With Azure ExpressRoute enhancing the new connectivity and our previous experience of delivering similar innovative solutions, we were able to make a smooth transition from an often problematical, multi-tenanted traditional hosted desktop environment.
To Quiss, a ‘cloud to cloud’ transfer holds no fears for its experienced team, having transitioned many clients into managed services, through a structured, customer- integrated approach to planning, project management and governance of the migration.
Quiss consistently impressed, right from their response to the selection process, through to the go-live. The knowledge and availability of Quiss’ leadership team throughout was a real differentiator for us and we look forward to a rewarding partnership with them.Paul Khan, Chief Executive Officer at Debenhams Ottaway
Weekend engineering works
The team included a mix of Project Managers, Senior Systems Engineers, Applications Engineers and Senior Network Engineers, with each given a time slot to undertake the work of transferring and moving data, ready for bringing the system online the next day.
There is a well-documented order to bringing systems online or for migrating them into an available infrastructure; typically this is a mix of manual and automated data transfer. Completing the majority of this work on the Saturday allowed time for testing and resolution of any issues on Sunday.
Once again, Quiss Technology had proved that a little lateral thinking with forward thinking clients such as Debenhams Ottaway, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and our Qworks solution, incorporates everything a law firm will need from both an operational and strategic perspective.