About TWM Solicitors

The Challenge

With staff operating out of multiple dispersed offices, TWM required high-performance connectivity between all sites, enabling seamless, highly secure collaboration between teams. Dissatisfied with the quality delivered by their incumbent provider, TWM's IT team engaged Exponential-e as their new connectivity partner, beginning with a complete revamp of the WAN.

The Solution

To achieve a smooth transition to the new network, with zero operational disruption, Exponential-e and TWM deployed a 'shadow' WAN that would ensure connections would remain available to all staff while the migration was completed over the course of six weeks. A key priority for the new network was achieving complete consistency for all offices - a significant challenge given the diverse nature of TWM's premises, which ranged from modern offices to a Victorian building and a sixteenth-century farmhouse. Close collaboration between teams at Exponential-e and TWM, combined with rigorous testing of the new infrastructure before the go-live date, ensured this was achieved across all sites, delivering an immediate return on the initial investment.

The close partnership established throughout this initial deployment was developed further when Exponential-e took over the management of the network's switches, allowing TWM's own IT team to refocus their attention on other business-critical projects.

The partnership entered its second stage when TWM made the decision to migrate from its legacy ISDN-based telephony to a Cloud-based platform, for which Exponential-e provided the foundation in the form of a dedicated VLAN, with its own gateway and firewall, which involved segmenting the existing network and switches, ensuring that that TWM's familiar quality of service would not be compromised.

With the new network infrastructure now established as the foundation, the decision was made to streamline and optimise TWM's VDI environment by migrating to Azure Virtual Desktop, minimising any jitter and ensuring staff at all their offices would enjoy a consistently seamless experience, particularly when accessing the Practice Management System (PMS). Beyond the immediate improvements in terms of performance and availability, this would serve as the foundation for a phased migration from on-premises servers to highly scalable, Cloud-based infrastructure.

These migrations were conducted on a site-by-site basis, with Exponential-e providing hands-on support throughout, ensuring all staff were properly trained in the new systems and able to make full use of their capabilities as quickly as possible. This included roundtable functions around Cloud transformation and cyber security, along with access to pre-sales personnel's specialist knowledge.

Teams from TWM and Exponential-e continue to work closely together in this regard, migrating more legacy on-premises systems into the Cloud, with the end goal being a completely centralised infrastructure that will provide the IT team with full control and visibility at all times, ensuring any potential issues can be proactively identified and resolved, and new teams and offices effortlessly onboarded.

Beyond the quality of the underlying connections, the success of this project has really hinged on the team at Exponential-e's willingness to work closely with us throughout the design of the new infrastructure, and throughout every stage of its deployment. We've got a strong foundation to build on now, and the next phases are already yielding good things.

Alan Barrett, Head of IT, TWM Solicitors.

Solution Benefits 

• A seamless migration to a new, high-performance WAN, delivering consistent networking quality across a range of diverse sites.
• High-quality, Cloud-based telephony, powered by a dedicated VLAN, optimising cross-site communication and collaboration.
• Providing the interconnection between Exponential-e's WAN and Azure through an ExpressRoute link, supporting Cloud migration objectives.
• An intelligent, phased migration process, avoiding any disruption while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.
• Expert support and consultation from a dedicated account team and a range of technical specialists.