One of the many mistakes we see law firms make is moving their firm to the cloud by simply migrating to servers hosted elsewhere, such as someone else’s datacenter or Microsoft’s Azure. While this plan is perfectly sufficient, SaaS is a huge missed opportunity for the firm to leverage better technology, experience better performance and security, and quite possibly save a significant amount of money.

The struggles of being on someone else’s servers

What do we mean by native cloud? Let’s look at the traditional server model first. Many firms had or still have servers on-site. A popular migration to the cloud is moving these servers onto what is called Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), essentially someone else’s servers. This could be Microsoft, Amazon or even a smaller provider with a single datacenter. Your firm is still managing a significantly managing a portion of the environment, whether with it’s own IT staff or by paying an outsourced provider such as Clear Guidance’s managed IT. Your firm and IT are stuck in the traditional struggle of managing updates, up-time and understanding how everything ties together.

Why native cloud apps are the ideal path forward

So what about true software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Examples include Office 365 and iManage’s cloud. These applications greatly minimize the technical capabilities needed to manage and support them, as you can concentrate on application experts instead of IT generalists. The application vendors themselves are incentivizing moving to SaaS as well, for a number of reasons:

They theoretically reduce support costs due to not having to support improperly configured environments, or providing support to IT who may not understand the correct setup for a law firm.
The lock in recurring revenue
They’re able to build a cloud platform significantly cheaper than any firm or general IT/cloud provider can, due to being able to customize it 100% around their product

A few specific, common mistakes we have seen:

Migrating virtual servers running iManage instead of deploying into iManage’s native cloud
Moving onto “private cloud” environments that are small scale datacenter deployments (we actually provide this type of cloud, so we know what we are talking about!) While it is a great fit for specific situations, it can also be an issue when meeting uptime or client requirements for redundancy.
Migrating from one document management system (DMS) or practice management (PM) to another legacy, server-based product
- When migrating DMS, it is a great time to evaluate Microsoft 365. While the basic product is not a powerful DMS on its own, there are lots of powerful 365 applications such as Repstor which fill in the gaps.
Upgrading Exchange email servers instead of migrating to Office/Microsoft 365

There are specific use cases that exist outside these recommendations, but they are getting rarer every day. Take a hard look at what a potential 100% cloud migration would look like. If you need assistance, our law firm practice CIOs regularly work with firms to build IT roadmaps and plan out migrations.

Moving your firm to a serverless cloud