Keeping your firm working

1. What usually causes downtime

Outages at professional firms are rarely dramatic. Most come from a short list of ordinary causes:

• an update that installs in the middle of the working day, or fails part-way;
• a laptop past its useful life that finally gives out;
• a subscription or licence that lapses because nobody was watching the renewal date;
• the office internet connection dropping;
• a mailbox that has to be locked down after a suspicious sign-in;
• ransomware, which is rarer but far more costly.

Each hour lost is an hour that can't be billed.

2. Monitoring

Monitoring is part of the monthly fee. Devices report their health, patch status and security alerts to us, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on every managed device is watched by the 24/7 cybersecurity remediation SOC.

3. Patching on a schedule

Operating systems and applications are patched on a schedule through Intune, and compliance is reported. Updates are planned rather than left to chance, so a forced restart is less likely to land in the middle of a client meeting or a filing.

4. Backups that have been restored

Microsoft 365 is backed up outside your tenant and test-restored on a schedule. The date of the last restore test is in your documentation register and your monthly report. See backup and business continuity.

5. Planned replacements, not surprises

Every device and its lifecycle is in the register, and licences and renewals are tracked there too. Replacements and renewals are discussed in the quarterly roadmap, so ageing laptops are swapped on a plan and new ones arrive ready to use through Windows Autopilot.

6. Response when something does break

If a whole team can't work, we respond within 15 minutes. If one person can't work, within 30 minutes. Everything else is picked up the same business day, and most problems are fixed remotely within the hour. When the fault sits with your internet provider, phone system or practice software vendor, we make the call.

What the firm itself does while something is down is covered in our guide to business continuity for law firms.

7. Why there is no uptime percentage here

We don't publish or promise an uptime figure. Downtime has causes outside anyone's control, and a percentage on a website doesn't stop an internet outage. What we commit to is above: how fast we respond, how we patch, and that your backups have actually been restored.