What a Full IT Audit Turned Up When 'Robert' Retired.

Just over a year ago, we helped a local law firm (firm name withheld) move off an old POP/SMTP email setup and onto hosted Microsoft 365. It was a clean project, and it went well. We grabbed quite a few large PST files from close to 20 workstations, and merged them in to people's new mailboxes in the cloud. But like most migrations, it gave us a look under the hood at everything else running in that office — and what we saw concerned us enough that we mentioned it more than once or twice actually.

Every time we brought up an issue, we got the same answer: "Robert will look into it."

Robert (we are not using his real name) was the firm's in-house jack of all trades. We only interacted with him once or twice as he for some reason avoided our team, but from what we were told he was a great guy, and had been there since the first day of the firm. Truly, he'd been the one holding the place together for years — a little bit of IT, sprinkled with hardware upgrades, run cables if needed, fix the coffee machine, do a bank run, cover for the receptionist and a little bit of whatever needed doing that day. We were told the firm had been through two real scares in the past decade because of the state of their systems. Nobody was ever quite sure whose job it was to fix the underlying problems, so nothing really changed. Business as usual.

At the start of this year, Robert took an extended leave, and a few months later he decided to retire. The firm called us and asked for something we get asked quite often: a full IT audit: Firewalls, routers, servers, workstations, printers, the phone system, internet service, backups, software licenses, cyber-security, wireless, even the photocopiers and cameras. Nothing off the table.

Here's some of what we found before and during the audit.

The firewall was a WatchGuard XTM2 series unit — a model that was discontinued back in 2012 - over fifteen years ago and hadn't seen a security update since 2017. It was still the only thing standing between their network and the internet.

Antivirus was a patchwork. Different free, consumer-grade programs on different machines, sometimes more than one on the same computer fighting each other. A few of them were tagging outgoing emails with a little note at the bottom saying the message had been scanned — which is a nice touch for a home user, and not something you want a law firm's clients seeing.

Backups were external hard drives that got physically carried back and forth between Robert's house and a shelf right below the fire sprinklers. No offsite service, no real rotation, no way to know for certain what condition those drives were in.

The phone system was an old analog setup from the dark ages. No company within the tri-county area supported it, nobody could rename an extension or record their own voicemail greeting — that had always been true, and it had just been lived with. One paralegal had been using the previous legal assistant's voicemail box for three years and still couldn't get into it to change the PIN. When a desk phone died, someone had to go hunt for a used replacement on eBay, and those were getting harder to find and more expensive every time.

We also found people logging into computers, and into various websites, including court systems, using accounts that belonged to employees who no longer worked there.

And then there was the server situation, which summed up the whole audit pretty well: one of the servers they were actually using had a same day, on site hardware warranty that had lapsed and expired. The old server — retired and powered off since 2024 — had a warranty contract that had just been renewed and paid for.

None of this happened because anyone was careless on purpose. It happened because one person carried too much for too long, nobody above him had the technical footing to know what questions to ask, and small unresolved issues just kept getting carried forward year after year until they piled up.

We're now working through the fixes with the firm — up to date firewall, proper protection software, local & cloud backups, possibly a new VoIP phone system, login cleanups and proper manufacturer coverage on crucial hardware are already underway. We are also negotiating with ISPs and helping the firm upgrade their internet connectivity with faster, cheaper and a more reliable one along with proper failover redundancies.

If it's been a while since anyone outside your office has actually looked at everything you're running — not just the computers, but the phones, the backups, the warranties, all of it — that's a conversation worth having before something forces the issue.

Start a conversation with us, or give us a call at (954) 274-9020.