'Hooray, the phones have gone': Upgrading comms at law firm Howard Kennedy
When London law firm Howard Kennedy LLC's 500 staff returned to their office after the pandemic eased, they noticed they had a bit more desk space. The old desk phones were gone.
While they worked from home, the IT team had been busy modernising the office's communications infrastructure, decommissioning the old on-premises PBX and bringing in a new cloud-based RingCentral UCC platform.
The move, which spelled the end of fiddly call-forwarding to mobiles, even attracted a modicum of praise for the IT team, which like most such outfits, generally only hears from users when something goes wrong.
"Silence is golden," laughed head of technology and security Jonathan Freedman. "No one ever comes and says, 'wow my laptop is so fast', but we did get some positive feedback from colleagues because all that telephony is now built into Teams."
Returning office workers also noticed the appearance of new communal areas and meeting rooms, part of a modernisation programme to allow more flexible ways of working, with individuals and teams no longer tied to their own banks of desks.
And those expecting to use the videoconferencing rooms and their Polycom kit found that those had gone, with all that functionality moved during the lockdowns first to Zoom then to Teams Rooms and accessible from their laptops.
Upgrading to WiFi 6
Behind the scenes, this was supported by an overhaul of the office networks and security and systems, including cloud-based web scanning and new access points. WiFi 6, introduced in 2020, provides significantly higher throughput and supports many more connected devices than the WiFi 5 system then in place, which was beginning to show its age.
"We implemented a new WiFi 6 solution within the office as part of a communication strategy to go wireless-first within the office," Freedman explained. "All connectivity within the building is via wireless. Even from desks, it's still on a wireless connection."
The Howard Kennedy team worked with the integrator Cisilion to survey the office, work out access point positioning and ensure there were no dead spots. Already familiar with Cisco technology, they nevertheless surveyed the market, assessing networking products by Juniper and Cisco before settling on Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches as the basis for the new system.
"Our internal skill set was already heavily invested in the Cisco infrastructure, so we decided it would make more sense to leverage our existing skill set," Freedman explained.
There were other considerations too, of course. As a law firm, security is paramount, and the new system also offers a robust basis for a zero trust architecture, providing the necessary telemetry to subdivide networks.
"All technology investments that we've been making over the last three years or so were only selected if they would also be part of the longer term strategy around zero trust," he said.
"What we're really doing there is breaking down our internal network. So rather than having an internal network and the internet, we're isolating our office and effectively having all communication going over the internet from any location.
"It's breaking down this traditional idea of having an office with a safe internal network while the rest of the world is external, to saying that, regardless of location, the same security controls and the same access gateways should all apply. We're doing a lot of work with Cisilion on that."
Flexible working
Microsoft 365 and Teams has been another central element of the rollout. Howard Kennedy leaves decisions over working from home to individual teams, but most people come into the office two or three days a week, Freedman said. Thus, home working remains very much part of the mix, one which brings some important security considerations.
"We do allow a certain amount of BYOD," Freedman said. "We use a lot of controls within Office 365. We'll allow email and teams on a personal device, but that's subject to a number of security controls."
The challenge of balancing security, agility and user experience will be familiar to many IT teams, but it's always important not to let the latter slide. For one thing, they'll soon let you know.
"The user experience has been an absolute key driver," Freedman said. "Nobody wants to upset their colleagues with a poor experience."