P2P

21 I L T A N E T . O R G O rganizations have been migrating services once considered the internal responsibility of each individual firm to dedicated service providers for years. Most large firms outsourced their library, facilities and print services years ago and never looked back. These firms identified that their business is practicing law and satisfying clients – not making sure the copy machines are operational. More recently the information technology functions at law firms have started to be looked at in a similar way. Forward-thinking law firms have realized that provisioning internal services – whether copy services, standing up a server or answering user support calls – is not unique to an individual firm. As a result, in recent years firms have moved toward utilizing legal managed service providers. This allows organizations to leverage economies of scale and provide 24/7 services to their organization without managing the cost and complexity needed to fulfill those functions in-house. Furthermore, these service providers are able to gain expertise due to their focus on the repeatable parts of the business that law firms, regardless of budget, cannot easily obtain. More recently, connectivity has allowed for infrastructure services to relocate from the law firm's internal data center. Originally this manifested itself in the provisioning of collocation facilities that allowed organizations to leverage the hardened security and environment that would otherwise be too cost-prohibitive to implement directly. Then colocation evolved into the cloud. Instead of just providing a location to place your equipment, vendors identified that they could offer a managed infrastructure and allow organizations to lease the use of computing and storage capacity. Initially this was a bridge too far for most organizations. The tools were there, but still out of reach for most due to complexity, cost and lack of familiarity. Meanwhile, software as a service became ubiquitous. The earliest foothold in legal was made by the mail security providers Mimecast and Proofpoint. Later, cloud litigation service providers offered cost-effective tools to move a storage and computing- intensive function out and away from a firm's data center. More recently, Office 365, document management and time and billing solutions offered cloud options that demonstrate compelling reasons not to host data internally. With the maturity of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, law firms now have the ability to easily and economically migrate those services that are not within SaaS solutions to secure, scalable and easy-to- manage cloud environments without the large capital expenditure requirements of the legacy data center. For many reasons, adoption of managed services (support services and infrastructure management) and "Connectivity has allowed for infrastructure services to relocate from the law firm's internal data center."

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