Goughs Solicitors (Goughs) is one of Wiltshire’s leading law firms with seven offices across the county, providing a wide range of legal services for individuals and businesses.
With over 140 years’ combined experience, they are committed to meeting and exceeding clients’ needs and providing excellent, trusted and personal legal services.
Goughs Solicitors had been working over the past year with their IT provider to virtualise their servers in VMWare, moving to the cloud for greater resilience and reliability.
The next phase, managed by Croft, was to virtualise the Mitel telephony system and migrate it to VMware and move away from traditional ISDN and migrate all seven offices over to centralised SIP, with the purpose of rationalising lines and for cost-saving benefits.
Goughs have had a Mitel MiVoice Connect telephony solution for seven years, with hardware and ISDN lines hardwired into each office. Goughs selected Croft to support the Mitel system, pre-Covid, because their incumbent provider did not have Croft’s skills or knowledge around the Mitel technology.
Goughs deployed Croft’s services to help them migrate their telephony over to SIP. Croft have repurposed the MiVoice Connect, which has been virtualised in VMWare in the customer’s data centre. The central server was a physical on-premise device and now Goughs can reap the benefits of a private cloud solution, primarily for continuity, security and reliability.
Croft’s role was to virtualise the telephony estate, away from physical appliances and moving Gough’s telephony infrastructure to the data centre. Croft conducted the migration in a phased approach, undertaking every element in a controlled manner. They decommissioned and unplugged the on-premise equipment, so Goughs no longer had cabinets full of equipment.
The next phase was to prepare the sites for porting the legacy ISDN DDI ranges to the new SIP service on a site by site basis. The final step was to migrate the users over to SIP, one office at a time, then decommission the legacy equipment. Staff are using the same Mitel handsets as with the legacy on-premise equipment, meaning there was no disruption to the user experience and no costs for replacing existing handsets.
" By virtualising Gough’s telephony and migrating them to use SIP trunking, we have enabled them to reduce call costs dramatically. And by centralising their lines to the cloud, they now have peace of mind that their telephony is more resilient, agile, secure and scalable. "
Croft have successfully migrated Goughs from legacy on-premise equipment to private cloud. The SIP trunking means they now benefit from inclusive local, national and mobile calls, which has brought their phone bill down substantially.
The phased deployment enabled Goughs to report back to the business as each phase was successfully completed, with a risk-free, seamless cutover and minimal downtime.
Goughs originally planned to deploy Croft’s support services on a temporary basis for the SIP migration.
Once the telephony system was virtualised, Goughs intended to retain all of their IT services with one central supplier, for both voice and data. However, they were so happy with Croft’s service, they have decided to continue using them for their expertise.