 By Randall Farrar With the current economic tsunami, many law firms are choosing to scale back technology costs and projects. Wanting to know firsthand what IT directors felt were the top technology trends law firms are still willing to invest in, I interviewed ten IT directors and discovered there are some very important technology trends making their way into to law firms now and in the near future. Of all the ideas the IT directors gave me, there are two I felt were the most significant. Both are exciting trends in that they reduce costs while being significant technology paradigm shifts. These two trends are virtualization and cloud computing. Trend One: Virtualization Technology virtualization, at its most basic, refers to the reduction of computer resources. Virtualization technologies enable a firm to consolidate multiple servers on to one machine, optimizing assets, while centrally managing all physical and virtual resources down to the application level. By providing virtualized desktop infrastructure, a firm can truly realize a significantly lower "total cost of ownership" (TCO), improved business continuity and improved security. With virtualization, firms experience high cost savings due to server consolidation and an increase in options for disaster recovery plans, as well as storage consolidation. The Desktop Increasingly employees require access to a firm's applications and data from various locations, and now devices, with the advent of PDAs (i.e., Blackberry). This demand creates technological complexity and places pressure on controlling costs for IT departments. Couple this with rises in hardware theft, securing a firm's hardware and data resources requires considerable resources. Virtualization allows employees to access a firm's applications and data securely over a network, which significantly minimizes the data loss risks when data is removed from a firm’s electronic walls. For the IT department, virtualization increases speed for deployment of new solutions and capabilities, without acquiring additional hardware. Further, virtualization reduces the need for application and environment testing and helps reduce application testing requirements, application testing, and compatibility issues and makes things much easier for disaster recovery. Disaster Recovery Firms implementing a reliable disaster recovery plan find that it is time-consuming and costly. It requires redundant infrastructure, storage and servers. Often, because of these constraints, many firms don’t have a complete disaster recovery plan to protect vital applications and infrastructure. Virtualization simplifies and increases the disaster recovery choices for a firm. If a firm already has deployed a disaster recovery plan for some applications, virtualization allows for protection to be extended to additional applications and data. Storage Virtualization also provides firm’s with storage consolidation, reducing a firm's investment and complexity in data centers, where computer systems and associated components are housed. Also, a virtualization storage solution improves storage for replication, de-duplication and thin provisioning. Trend Two: Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a wide and overlapping term that refers to using the Internet ("cloud") as the base technology for various computing services. Cloud computing is a powerful approach to computing where virtualized resources are provided as "software as a service" (SaaS). What's great about cloud computing is the user doesn't need any expertise or knowledge of the underlying technology, making it particularly attractive to small and medium sized law firms that do not have a dedicated IT staff. Cloud computing takes SaaS to a new level for firms, by incorporating the richness of Web 2.0 and other familiar web technology trends that focus on specific solutions. Examples of SaaS that utilize underlying technology and data that is stored on a remote server are well known and include Google Apps and Microsoft Office Online. Cloud Computing – Applications as a Service An SaaS leverages the cloud with underlying software architecture eliminating the need to install and run an application on the firm's client’s computer. This eliminates the hassles of software maintenance and support. Examples of applications as a service include Skype, Salesforce (an online client relationship manager), Rocket Matter (online practice management, time and billing solution), CT Summation Lexbe, Google Apps and Microsoft Office Online. Client as a Service A cloud client is made up of computer hardware and software that is dependent on the cloud for delivering the application or service. Most of us use this technology everyday with such programs as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, iPhone, CherryPal and Google Chrome. Infrastructure as a Service Cloud infrastructure as a service is the delivery of the complete computer infrastructure. Infrastructure as a service allows a firm to eliminate costly servers. Rather than purchasing software, servers, data storage and network equipment, clients purchase these resources as a fully outsourced service. Examples of infrastructure as a service include GoGrid (a virtual server host), Amazon EC2, SETI and Sun Grid Engine. Platform as a Service Platform as a service delivers the entire computing environment as a platform. It can also provide a solution platform as a service that facilitates deploying applications, thus decreasing difficulty and the cost of buying and managing in-house hardware and software technologies. Platform as a service helps developers to develop, test, deploy, host and support on a consistent integrated environment, without the need to develop an application on one system and then deploy it on another. It also has built-in scalability, reliability and security. That is, the client data is secure, network traffic is not an issue, source code and the underlying platform software are maintained automatically. Examples of platform as a service include Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine and Force.com. Cloud Service A cloud service is a web-based software technology designed to support computer-to-computer inter-operation over a web based network. A cloud service can be accessed by other cloud computing technologies. Examples of cloud service include Google Maps, MSN Maps, OpenID, PayPal and Alexa. Storage as a Service Cloud storage as a service entails the delivery of data storage as a service. The most common use includes document management and database-type services. Examples of storage as a service include Netdocuments (an online Document Management System),SpringCM, Amazon SimpleDB, and Microsoft Skybox. Conclusion Virtualization and cloud computing allow some or all software, data and applications to reside either in a virtualized or cloud environment, which reduces the "actual hardware technology and the complexity of on-site software support and maintenance. These technologies, with storage technologies overlapping both, will have immediate and long-term cost benefits for law firms. Even in this incredibly unpredictable economic environment, virtualization and cloud computing are investments that add to a firm’s competitiveness, by reducing costs and increasing profits. About the author: Randall Farrar is the president and co-founder of Esquire Innovations, a leading provider of Microsoft Office integrated practice management software services and applications for the legal market. Page: 1 of 1 pages for this article
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