In 2024, NCDV experienced a security breach. Atlas Cloud was brought in to lead the remediation. Stabilising the environment, identifying vulnerabilities, and putting interim protections in place. The incident made clear the underlying platform was not fit for purpose, and accelerated the decision to move.
National Legal Service (NLS) and the National Centre for Domestic Violence (NCDV) were running on an ageing, multi-tenancy hosted VDI environment. The platform had become expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and increasingly unreliable, with slow logins and inconsistent performance affecting staff across ten UK offices.
For organisations working in legal services and safeguarding, disruption is not a tolerable risk. The requirement was a controlled transition that could manage immediate security exposure while building a more resilient foundation without affecting the staff and clients who depended on those systems every day.
a noticeable impact
“The difference in day-to-day performance is significant. Staff are no longer dealing with slow logins or unreliable systems, and the move away from the legacy environment has made a noticeable impact. The new approach is faster, simpler, and better supports the way our teams actually work across multiple locations.”
Anthony Morris
IT Manager, National Legal Service
The solution we provided
Atlas Cloud designed and delivered a cloud-first environment built around Microsoft 365 and Azure addressing the security incident, retiring the legacy infrastructure, and standardising the platform across both organisations.
The solution included:
- Moved all users from hosted remote desktop sessions to locally-executed, cloud-secured workstations under a Zero Trust endpoint model, removing the shared-environment risk that had contributed to the breach.
- Migrated legacy shared drives into Azure Files with clear entity separation, and introduced SharePoint and Teams for collaboration across the group.
- Worked directly with Peppermint throughout a live CX to CX365 application transition — the first of its kind ensuring case management workflows remained uninterrupted.
- Standardised device builds, security policies, and onboarding across all ten offices, replacing a fragmented setup that had varied significantly by site.
- Aligned the new environment with Cyber Essentials security principles, with identity-driven access controls across all entities in the group.
The outcome
The migration was completed within the required timeframe. Both organisations were fully operational on the new platform the morning after the cutover, with no interruption to client work. The immediate performance improvements were tangible but the longer-term value is in what the new platform enables.
Security
Performance
Operations
Scalability
Facing a Similar Challange?
Atlas Cloud works with law firms, chambers, and legal services organisations to modernise their IT infrastructure securely — and without disruption to client work.
See how we can help here – law firm IT support.
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