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When you run IT at one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious law firms, every moment matters when it comes to server uptime, data security, and ongoing compliance. The stakes are high: hundreds of attorneys and staff members rely on continual access to tens of millions of sensitive documents and client information—as well as the billing systems that enable the business to remain profitable.
To keep up with evolving demands, WeirFoulds LLP set out to replace its legacy on-premise infrastructure with a modern, stable cloud environment. The goal? Improve availability and scalability while eliminating downtime and freeing IT staff up to spend less time handling incidents—and more time supporting the business.
With our support, the firm was able to make a clean transition to a tailored, private, and managed cloud hosting solution that reduced risk and incidents, supported SOC2 compliance, and provided the stable infrastructure necessary for uninterrupted casework, research, and collaboration.
A large part of the reason legacy infrastructure was no longer working was that the building which housed the servers was a pre-1960s facility that was prone to outages. Power would be lost multiple times a year, leading to frantic weekend-long triage sessions for the entire 8-person IT team—and would routinely cause the business to grind to a halt.
“It used to be common for there to be very long outages which makes it hard to keep good practices and good relationships with clients. And every time we have an incident or outage—that kind of behavior discourages IT staff from doing improvement on the system. You don’t know what you’re gonna break.” - Cathal Gillivan, Senior Support Analyst
Bottom line, while the team was busy trying to support the firm’s lawyers it was struggling to keep up with the maintenance demands of the system—which resulted in more vulnerabilities. The vicious cycle had to end.
The team had to conduct a high-stakes migration to the cloud without disrupting the firm’s operations or compromising client data—and reached out to us to help.
With all the sensitivities that come with running a high-profile law firm, public cloud wasn’t an option the firm felt comfortable with. In collaboration with the Aptum team, the firm decided to move forward with a private, dedicated core infrastructure environment as a service. The servers would be located in our Scarborough, ON location (keeping data entirely within Canada) and provide single-tenant servers, high availability firewalls, and all applicable licensing—complete with full management up to the virtual layer, plus dedicated support.
“I’m very impressed with Aptum’s security. Going on site and seeing how everything works—that’s huge. To have a visualization and see that everything is secure—it gives us peace of mind.” — Joshua Wong, Director, IT
A dedicated VMware environment meant WeirFoulds could right-size the environment to their needs, scaling up and down with ease. We provided the necessary licenses and worked with the team to pilot the environment set up. From there, the migration unfolded in stages, transferring 42 million documents and robust billing systems to the new environment without a hitch.
The WeirFoulds team is growing, and the system is scaling well. With a single-pane-of-glass view, the IT function has the visibility they need into the environment, and the ability to transfer workloads between containers, and generally organize data and components with freedom and flexibility.
And best of all? No outages and zero downtime. Legal and support staff enjoy on-demand access to the systems they need to do their work, and the system is thriving—recently having increased from 220 users to 250+ users with no issues. The attorneys are happy, the IT team is relieved, and the relationship between WeirFoulds and our team has never been stronger.
The WeirFoulds team collaborates with us on a regular basis to make improvements, address issues, and generally partner to make sure the system is performing as well as it should be. There’s a great deal of trust between all the stakeholders and that comes down to being honest and transparent—a major quality for IT leadership.
“Transparency is something I always look for from a partner. We’re okay with people making mistakes, but not okay when someone tries to cover it up. It affects everyone—the whole firm.” – Joshua Wong, Director, IT
In addition to transparency, constant communication with our team makes everyone feel like they’re on the same page—not just reaching out when something goes wrong. And finally, there’s reliability: we have the tools and know-how to get the job done.
