Heeney Lawyers: on-prem to cloud in 90 days

The challenge

Heeney Lawyers ran its practice on a single server sitting in the office. It worked, until it started to feel like a liability. The hardware was aging, which meant a growing risk of failure. The backup was a legacy setup nobody had tested under real conditions, so "we have backups" was more hope than fact. Remote access was awkward at a time when the firm wanted flexibility.

For a law firm the stakes are higher than lost hours. Client files are confidential, and the Law Society of Ontario expects firms to protect them. Heeney needed modern security and reliable access, and they needed to get there without a disruptive, risky changeover that put client work on hold.

The approach: quick wins first, then the big move

We do not start a migration by moving everything at once. That is how firms end up with a bad week and a worse reputation. We sequenced the work so the firm got safer on day one and kept working the whole way through.

First, the quick wins. We turned on multi-factor authentication across every account and rebuilt the backup as immutable off-site copies, so even a ransomware incident would have a clean, recent version to restore from. Those two changes closed the biggest security gaps before we touched the server.

Then the migration. We moved email, files, and daily work into Microsoft 365, tested each piece with real users, and cut over in stages so nobody lost access. The office server was retired only after its replacement was proven in production.

Finally, the policy work. Cloud is only as secure as its configuration. We set retention policies, documented who can access what, and left the firm with security settings aligned to Law Society expectations, not just out-of-the-box defaults.

The 90-day timeline

• Weeks 1–2MFA rolled out firm-wide, backups modernised to immutable off-site copies, and a full inventory of what needed to move.
• Weeks 3–8Staged migration into Microsoft 365, user by user and workload by workload, with testing at every step.
• Weeks 9–12Server retirement, retention and access policy configuration, documentation, and handover.

Zero downtime was not luck. It was the entire point of the staged plan.

The results

Heeney Lawyers now works from a secure cloud environment with single sign-on and MFA, performance that is noticeably faster than the old server, and backups that are genuinely recoverable. Security here is not a one-time project. DASTech has supported the firm for over a year and a half since the migration, handling day-to-day requests and keeping the environment current as the firm grows.

Tools we used

• ✓Microsoft 365 for email, files, and collaboration
• ✓Multi-factor authentication and single sign-on on every account
• ✓Immutable off-site backups
• ✓Security and retention policies aligned to Law Society of Ontario expectations