Cloud Migration for a Law Firm Outgrowing Its Server Closet

The Challenge

The firm is a 30-person law practice in Montreal specialising in commercial real estate. For years, their files lived on an aging Dell server in a utility closet — no redundancy, no tested backups, and no remote access beyond a flaky VPN that most lawyers had stopped using.

When a failed drive took the server offline for a full business day, the managing partner realised the firm had no verified backup. The IT contractor eventually recovered the data, but it took 14 hours and the experience shook the partnership’s confidence. They also had growing concerns about PIPEDA compliance, particularly around client file handling and data residency — their files couldn’t leave Canada.

Our Approach

We ran an infrastructure audit that catalogued every application, file share, and integration the firm depended on. We then designed a migration to OVHcloud’s Montreal data centre, keeping all data within Canadian borders.

The migration included Microsoft 365 with SharePoint for document management, a properly configured backup system with IDrive — daily snapshots and monthly recovery testing — and a secure remote access setup that replaced the broken VPN. We completed a PIPEDA gap analysis and provided the firm with documentation they could hand to their insurer and their clients.

The cutover happened over a weekend. Staff came in Monday to the same file structure in a faster, cloud-hosted environment. The server closet was decommissioned.

The Outcome

The firm went from roughly four hours of unplanned downtime per month to under twenty minutes. Backups are tested monthly — the last recovery drill completed in 42 minutes. Every lawyer now has reliable remote access, which the managing partner credits with improving client response times. Infrastructure costs dropped by $1,800 per month once the on-premise hardware maintenance contracts were cancelled.