Peer to Peer Magazine

9 WWW.ILTANET.ORG BEST PRACTICES The Future of the Data Center last summer Microso ran a successful trial of an underwater data center in a cylindrical capsule eight feet in diameter. Microso researchers believe they can mass produce these underwater capsules and shorten deployment time from two years to 90 days for new data centers. Keeping equipment under the ocean will take care of stringent air conditioning needs and decrease the physical distance from customers on the coasts, reducing latency. Microso is also looking for ways to harness energy produced by ocean currents to create electricity. Because it will be more difficult to send engineers to perform repairs, the company is designing servers that can run without being touched for years at a time. Another Microso development that portends the full ascension of the cloud is the Nano Server, which was released in April 2016. Nano is designed specifically to run cloud applications and to be managed remotely. It will require less patching and use resources beer. The Microso Windows Server Team wrote in a blog post, "Nano Server will allow customers to install just the components they require and nothing more." The company's thinking seems along the same lines as that of the modern law firm, which is looking for agility and efficiency from its technology. P2P Customers only pay for what they use, whereas with physical data centers, customers usually rent more capacity than is used. The cloud model makes sense especially for small law firms that need relatively few servers and lile storage space. For midsize and larger firms, the pay-as- you-go model is not necessarily cheaper, and switching to the cloud can be both complicated and expensive. Further, once firms have made the change, they are at the whim of their cloud providers, which can raise prices as they please. However, just as the process of co-locating has become significantly less expensive and more accessible over the past two years, cloud computing will follow suit. The end of the brick-and-mortar data center will afford firms the ability to be more flexible and move faster. Initiatives that used to take years will take weeks. IT departments will be able to support new office branches and deploy soware faster. Compliance Concerns Due to concern for security, many clients express reluctance to moving to the public cloud, and there is good reason for their hesitation. Firms have less control over the security of their data once in the cloud, and there are more entry points for aackers. Some large Am Law 100 firms, catering to their financial clients, are hardening the security around their physical data centers rather than moving away from them. The need for a secure cloud, however, is unlikely to remain unmet. The cloud storage and file-hosting company Box, for example, recently released a service that allows its customers to store files in data centers in other countries to meet compliance regulations. We will see more companies striving to meet the demand for security as cloud hosting continues to gain traction. Some very large firms will nevertheless choose to build their own data centers as Box did: It began with Amazon's AWS and moved to its own data centers as it expanded. Future Visions The data centers of the future (those that host the cloud data) will undergo radical innovation. According to a February 2016 article in "The New York Times," MARCUS BLUESTEIN Marcus Bluestein is the Chief Technology Officer at Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. He has extensive experience architecting and implementing systems at law firms of all sizes. In addition, he has actively led strategic consulting engagements in areas such as needs analyses, business continuity, data center consolidations and disaster recovery. Contact Marcus at bluestein@kraftkennedy.com. NINA LUKINA Nina Lukina is a Business Analyst in the New York office of Kraft & Kennedy. She has worked on many IT strategy and information security projects for law firms and researches emerging topics in technology for Kraft Kennedy. Contact her at lukina@kraftkennedy.com. Microsoft ran a successful trial of an underwater data center in a cylindrical capsule eight feet in diameter. IMAGE SOURCE: MICROSOFT

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