Five Key Considerations for Law Firms Before Moving to the Cloud

18
May
2011

James Whitemore

The cloud. It seems like everyone is talking about how computing is moving to the cloud. And there is certainly an element of truth to that. Gartner estimates that the cloud market will reach $150-billion by 2013. Among the reasons for this sudden interest are the need for collaboration among the increasing number of remote and mobile attorneys, a desire to improve client service, and the goal of cost-efficiently improving operations.

But should your firm make the switch? To help you decide if you need to move to the cloud, here are five key elements to consider.

1. Distributed vs. centralized enterprise
   The first consideration should be whether your firm has multiple locations or everyone under one roof. If you have several offices or a significant number of your attorneys spend most of their time out of the office, moving to the cloud simplifies management of communications and applications – which, in turn, improves collaboration between employees.
2. IT staff size and capabilities
   The next consideration is the size of your IT staff. In the past few years, many legal firms have severely pared their IT staffs. Additionally, while technology has continued to advance at an ever-accelerating pace, very little has been spent on training or upgrading skill sets. Cloud-based computing solves this issue because the burden of keeping up with technology advances is shifted from your firm to the service provider.
3. Prepare the infrastructure – ditch the public Internet
   Once you’ve determined that the cloud is right for your firm, it’s important to look at your network infrastructure. Networks at legal firms with multiple locations are often a hodgepodge of carriers and equipment that were built over a period of years. With cloud computing, an inadequate infrastructure can quickly become overwhelmed by the sudden up-tick in digital traffic. When that occurs, you will experience a level of service from your cloud-based applications that doesn’t meet your expectations. But there’s more to it than bumping up bandwidth. Using the public Internet as the basis for your cloud is leaving a lot to chance. Despite improvements in recent years, it’s still not reliable enough. All it takes is one failure to bring the flow of information to a crashing halt.
4. Be able to prioritize network traffic
   With the Internet, all traffic looks the same. Which means if research data for an important brief arrives at the same time as last night’s highlights from ESPN, the latter may win out. A fully managed Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network provides one quality of service (QOS) and routing capability over the entire network. It allows you to prioritize traffic by business case rather than simply on the type of traffic (video, voice, data, etc.) to ensure that business-related data always goes ahead of non-business data.
5. Controlled migration or rip-and-replace?
   Once the infrastructure is in place, it’s time to start moving applications to the cloud. One of the prevailing myths is that this is an all-or-nothing proposition. In reality, migration to the cloud is complex, so performing a complete rip-and-replace is a bad business decision fraught with risk. A better approach is to start with smaller, lower-risk environments such as a remote office, and implement less complex applications such as a cloud-based communications platform. You can work slowly, test the procedures, refine them, and ensure that they are fully integrated into your business processes. From there, you can migrate as business needs dictate.

Ready or not, the future is coming

The legal profession is highly competitive, so you can be sure if you’re not looking at cloud solutions and how to speed adoption of the latest technologies, your competitors are.

But there’s no need to go it alone. The right partner can help you migrate to the cloud intelligently and successfully, allowing you to achieve the operational excellence you demand while delivering superior client service.