Peer to Peer Magazine

49 WWW.ILTANET.ORG To make maers worse, while lawyers require rigorous security assurances, they also require optimal efficiency. The legal world is fast-paced, making it IT's responsibility to guarantee lawyers instant access to data whenever they need it. IT must also make sure data custody isn't jeopardized. Lawyers can be asked to prove the status and whereabouts of relevant court documents at any time. When the request comes from a judge, it oen lands squarely on IT's plate. To maintain the level of data access and security required in the legal field, law firms are le with two options: Hire more IT staff. (Note: This is not the answer your chief financial officer is looking for.) Deploy predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that allow you to do more with less, without sacrificing security or efficiency. While some large law firms have no problem building out impressive well-staffed IT teams, option one doesn't cut it for most legal organizations. Instead, the future of legal IT is reliant on deploying smarter solutions. AI and predictive analytics essentially will allow administrators to create a self-driving IT environment where the majority of processes are automated. This will allow teams to focus on larger initiatives. What Predictive Analytics Can Do With predictive analytics extended across the entire infrastructure stack, assuring that data remain secure and readily available becomes a much less painstaking endeavor. Predictive analytics, and eventually artificial intelligence, operate as an extra pair of eyes and hands for IT departments, automatically detecting and fixing problems as they arise. This means IT departments are continuously informed about the security and availability of their data. With predictive infrastructure in place, teams can guarantee that data protection plans (e.g., backup and replication) are not falling behind or being missed altogether. The ability to automate data protection combined with predictive analytics ensures information is always protected and available without burdensome and time-consuming manual intervention or monitoring. 1 2 Predictive Analytics Shaping the Future of Legal Tech FEATURES Predictive analytics can bring peace of mind to legal IT teams by identifying any nuances in infrastructure which might signal an aempt to compromise data security, impair system availability or introduce other potential risks. Ideally, the predictive infrastructure not only encrypts the data but also maintains encryption during replication to a secondary array. This means that information is never exposed and is constantly backed up should any of the data be infected with a major cyber threat such as ransomware. Ransomware encrypts information and renders it useless. But when predictive infrastructure is monitoring an environment, it oen can identify the additional and nuanced workload as an abnormality and alert administrators. With data already backed up and protected, creating duplicates of the information and reverting systems to a past point in time become quick and seamless. While AI and predictive analytics offer the promise of increased security, they also guarantee the availability and reliability that lawyers require. Predictive infrastructure can provide six nines availability, with the technology only standing to improve when it's designed to continually learn and get smarter as its adoption increases. With always-on data availability, law firms can respond quickly to court orders for data. These orders require organizations to assure that they've provided all relevant information and that there is no possibility that data were lost or corrupted. Predictive analytics can identify any disruption or slowdown that could affect a firm's ability to respond quickly to these requests. In addition, features such as auditing and checksums can ensure information has not been compromised or tampered with, validating chain of custody standards. A Saving Grace Most of the legal profession will always be cautious when moving forward with technological advancements, but firms that don't embrace predictive analytics technology will fall behind their peers. Although artificial intelligence is in its infancy, technological development is accelerating at such a quick rate that in a few years most firms will leverage AI. Until then, predictive analytics will serve as the saving grace for the overworked and understaffed IT departments in the legal world. P2P SAKTHI CHANDRA Sakthi Chandra is Sr. Director of Solutions Marketing at Nimble Storage, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. In his current role, Sakthi is responsible for defining and executing the outbound marketing strategies for Nimble Storage. Chandra has nearly 20 years of product marketing and management experience in Enterprise technology. Predictive analytics can identify any disruption or slowdown that could affect a firm's ability to respond quickly.

• Cover