Cloud strategy: security, scalability, productivity, TIME

I was singlehandedly managing the IT environment for a growing law firm with three offices across Australia – and it was taking over my life.

It’s not often you get to solve a complex challenge overnight, but that’s exactly what happened when we moved iManage from on-premises to the cloud. If you’ve worked in IT for more than 10 years, you can probably relate to the before picture: I was singlehandedly managing the IT environment for a growing law firm with three offices across Australia.

In seven years, our workforce tripled, and our legacy infrastructure was aging. I spent my time patching issues to keep the system that our lawyers rely on running – and it was taking over my life. I ate dinner with my laptop instead of my family and my pinging phone kept me up at night. My wife was not happy!

When I saw iManage in the Cloud in action at a conference, it kicked off a cloud strategy that made our firm more secure, scalable, and productive – and gave me my life back.

This is what I learned on our journey to the cloud:

1. Find the right partner

We’ve been happy iManage customers for years, so we knew we had the right solution, we just needed to move it to the cloud. As an IT team of one, I brought in our trusted partners, Morae Global, to streamline the integration – and together we pulled off a seamless transformation.

Finding the right partner is just as important as finding the right solution. We’ve been working with Morae since 2006, and the Morae team was as excited as I was about the project. When we needed support from iManage, the iManage team was available around the clock to offer advice and help us optimize our environment.

When we were ready to switch over to the cloud, we shut down our systems at the end of the day. When I woke up, everything just worked. My stress levels dropped and working on my weekends became a thing of the past. The result? One happy wife.

2. Streamline change management

Thanks to our seamless migration, lawyers could use the platform they knew and loved with no disruption, which wouldn’t have been the case with an on-premises solution. iManage Work 10 is core to our business, and the volume of data we produce and store in line with regulations is growing rapidly.

Where we really added value to the legal team was with the enhanced features embedded in iManage Work and iManage Share. Initially, we migrated new starters to the latest version of iManage and let everyone else carry on using the old interface, but soon everyone wanted the features that came with iManage Work.

Lawyers particularly love using the document timeline to simplify version control, the work panel that pops up in Microsoft Outlook, and being able to search without scrolling through vast quantities of data to find what they need. As for iManage Share, it has the drag and drop functionality you’d expect from a consumer-grade cloud storage platform, with professional levels of security, and makes both collaboration and sharing documents with clients much easier.

Ultimately, our lawyers can work faster, more efficiently, and can focus more on billable tasks.

3. The journey is ongoing

Without the shackles of legacy infrastructure, moving to iManage Cloud has given us the time and agility to focus on how we can better support users. I have total confidence that iManage in the Cloud and iManage Threat Manager have increased our security, so I have time to think more strategically. My new in-house IT team are currently looking at how iManage Security Policy Manager can support a Zero Trust environment so we can assure clients that only authorized personnel can access their data. We’re also exploring artificial intelligence to automate time-consuming processes.

We’re proud to be an iManage law firm. We shout about it on our tenders, and I know we’re providing lawyers with the best possible tools to support our clients.

Read the case study to learn more about how breaking the shackles of legacy infrastructure and moving to iManage Cloud was a life-changing move for the COO of Gilchrist Connell.