Forecast: Law firms will be cloud ready by 2021
Law firms have long talked about the attractiveness of migrating their IT infrastructure to the cloud, but they have not made appreciable steps to date. This is due in large part to an understandable fear of negative client reaction, especially in regulated markets such as finance. In truth, restrictive outside counsel guidelines of even a few large clients often were enough to put the brakes on cloud initiatives.
But times are – finally – changing.
First, many large institutional clients now use the public cloud including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for everything from software development to email and productivity, and law firms have had enough experience with trailblazing SaaS-based vendor cloud solutions such as NetDocuments and ChromeRiver to feel more comfortable with the technology. Second, data security — which was always touted as a reason not to move to cloud solutions — has now emerged as a reason to move toward them. The industry is beginning to accept that large vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google are far more capable of securing sensitive data than firms with limited budgets, talent and resources. And third, the initial belief that going “cloud” is an all-or-nothing proposition (and thus easy for risk-adverse partners to veto en masse) has now shifted to a more nuanced workloadspecific, and even client-specific, cloud strategy.
Based on these evolving market conditions, we forecast that law firms will be ready to move most of their workload – 75% on average – into public and vendor cloud solutions by 2021. In this whitepaper, we highlight the key workloads moving to public and vendor cloud, and how each of these changes impact the law firm of the future.
Read the full white paper above
