As one of Bay of Plenty’s largest and most accomplished law firms, Holland Beckett Law have had many reasons to celebrate in their 83-year tenure. None more than surviving a near-disaster during March April 2020 Lockdown Level 4. 

As COVID-19 slammed the brakes on the nation last year, Holland Beckett Law found themselves staring down the barrel of choosing between who could work, and who couldn’t. “Our old servers were at capacity and we were running out of disk space,” recalls Sharline Fitzgerald, Practice Manager at Holland Beckett Law. “We thought we would only manage about 30 people working remotely at a time.”

For a company with a headcount of 120+ staff across Tauranga, Rotorua, Whakatane and Opotiki, this was a bleak prospect. Rewind a few months, and Holland Beckett Law had been searching for a new IT partner to review their existing on-premise infrastructure and look at the possibility of shifting to the cloud.

After approaching seven IT companies to pitch for the job, Holland Beckett chose Business Technology Group (BTG) for their local presence, specialist engineers and how they related to the wider team. Having already made the decision to shift to the cloud and a few other challenges cropping up, Lockdown 4 created a new kind of urgency. 

Then when Lockdown 4 hit, BTG shifted their priorities to remote working. “We had to get everyone working from home first. Then we carried on with the migration of all of their servers and storage from their business premise to our data centres. Everything was moved while we were in full lockdown,” Ted Ebbing, Business Development Manager at BTG Tauranga says. 

As a result of the government-imposed conditions, testing the migration in a controlled environment was out of the question. In response, BTG suggested running a trial over the weekend enabling them to be able to test a portion of Holland Beckett’s systems in the cloud without impacting performance. After a successful trial, BTG rolled out the complete migration over Easter Weekend. 

Despite the unorthodox solution, IT Manager Dave Dowie couldn’t be happier with the results. “For BTG to even have been able to do that while we’re in lockdown was pretty impressive. I’m very happy with the transition, given the situation,” he said. 

Moving forward to today and Holland Beckett is more than happy to dish out compliments for the Technology Service Provider with teams based in Tauranga and across the country. 

“They’re technically excellent. They have a really good understanding of what we need our IT systems for and what we’re trying to achieve.” – Dave Dowie says. “They’re along there with us. They don’t just sit back and watch us make mistakes. They’re happy to point something out and they’re great at coming up with different ways to do things.”

A partnership that was strengthened under tough circumstances, both Holland Beckett and BTG are excited about the future. None more than Tauranga local, Ted Ebbing. “The team at Holland Beckett Law are excellent to deal with. This was particularly evident through this extraordinary time with Level 4 Lockdown. It is awesome to have them on board as another valued client.”