What computer server should you have for your law firm?
Law firms that require data security needs a server of some sort. Or at least file storage. We’re going explore 2 options that’ll support up to 100 users for a small to medium sized law firm:
Self Hosted or On Premise Servers
This one is more traditional. You’ll have setup a physical server, and size it to your organization user base. We recommend at least 16 cores on a modern processor, plenty of ram if you’re running any practice management software such as Esilaw, PClaw, or the old school software. Although we do push clients to using web based practice management software (Let’s not get confused between cloud based and web based. They’re similar, but different.)
Storage we recommend rolling with NVME storage to have fast speeds as they’re relatively cheap. But if you need a lot more storage, standard solid state drives setup in RAID6 is perfectly adequate providing you have enough IOPS. IOPS are the amount of reads and write of data to your disks, simultaneously.
Here’s the skeleton of a standard server that you must have in your business:
Physical Host Server, as of this article we recommend Windows Server 2025 Standard
1 Virtual Server that is a domain controller, active directory, computer polices. This is a controller that manages your group of computers and setup controls that prevent your users from doing things that they’re not supposed to do.
1 Application Server (if you’re running applications) or File Server.
This is where you keep all your working files and related files. AKA “Network Drives” or your “Z:\” drive as commonly seen in organizations.
If you’ve got an app server, I would recommend spinning up a file server just to store files if you’re above 50 users.
Firewall, Network switches, server racks and access points are also required for your working environment
It’s important to have your production servers virtualized as they’re in “containers.” This allows for ease of backup, and ease of recovery of your data should something be compromised. We often recommend a 3-2-1 backup method.
Option 2, Hybrid or use our Microsoft Azure File Storage with AzureAD
The cost of cloud storage has come down significantly. For example, a fast 2TB of data storage from Microsoft Azure is roughly $600 per month. And you don’t need to have all of the above things. The reason why we recommend AFS is because it’s native to Windows and it can be pushed out to your computers as soon as a user logs into their Microsoft 365 account on their computer. M365 Biz Premium is roughly $29~36/per user/month, and you likely have this already.
To set this up, you’ll need minimum of Microsoft 365 Business Premium, and I would encourage you to check out all the security stack that M365 Biz Premium has to offer in terms of EDR, MDR, XDR etc..
The AFS will show up in your “File Explorer” just like any other regular shared drive. This is a great native solution that offers excellent convenience and get you up and running without managing hardware.
It’s important to know that just because the data is stored with Microsoft, it doesn’t mean it is secure. It is still important to ensure you have a security stack for all your computers, multifactor authentication and backups. Yes—your data should still be backed up even though it is stored with Microsoft. We offer various solutions, whether it’s native to Microsoft Azure, VEEAM, or utilising other tools.
Hope this helps in your decision making, or you can contact us if you have any questions in a new server setup for your law firm.