The Solution

Perhaps the obvious solution would be to simply replace the original server but Katch recommended against it. In-house servers came from an older model of doing business. Katch had learned that the attorneys in the firm often needed to access documents while on the road or working remotely. The team had grown frustrated with the firm's old VPN, which functioned at a glacial pace and worse, was severely lacking in security. To that end, the firm required industrial level encryption. For the Alternis IT team, the solution quickly became evident — the firm should implement a cloud-based system. 

“We knew that in this case replacing one server with another would ultimately just be limiting,” said Katch. “A new server would still be subject to the same inherent issues as the old. What would happen if that server went down? It was still too risky.” 

Instead, the team designed a solution that was elegant and future-proof which was also redundant and never goes down. They leveraged the 99.97% uptime and ease of Dropbox for Business to create a system that was also secure enough to manage legal and medical records. 

Though it was an elegant solution, it still meant that 15 years of the firm’s confidential client and business data would have to be migrated to the cloud. Adding to the problem was the fact that the system was so old, early attempts to data through conventional means repeatedly failed. The team decided to physically remove the server’s hard drive and carefully extract the information and transport it to another system so that it could be later implemented in Dropbox.  

The process was painstaking but necessary. 

“They’re paying us to do the job right,” said Katch, who confirmed that all 15-years of the firm’s data has successfully been transferred — down to the last kilobyte. As Katch said, “We’re very thorough.”