Peer to Peer Magazine

15 WWW.ILTANET.ORG BEST PRACTICES How SaaS-based Services Impact Law Firm Business Continuity Planning JONATHAN REED Jonathan Reed is the CEO and Co-Founder of AdvoLogix, a leading provider of legal case and matter management applications for law firms and corporate legal departments. He is an enterprise software executive with experience at several high-growth, entrepreneurial organizations. Reed currently leads AdvoLogix growth in the SaaS market for accelerating the success of legal operations. He also serves as chief security officer for the company and advises clients on cloud-security conformance and governance for critical SaaS applications. He previously worked at Compaq Computer, BMC Software, Sybase, NEON Systems and Cisco Systems. Reed was the senior vice president of marketing and the marketing team lead for NEON System's IPO, and then spent six years as an officer of the publicly traded company. He can be reached at jreed@advologix.com. following morning, he texted all employees, offering to get them food and water if needed, and then made plans for everyone to either work from home if they could or come into the main office where there was extra space. Having the firm's entire infrastructure accessible via the cloud enabled Ayo & Iken to keep working in the wake of Hurricane Irma. Because the court systems generally have superior resources, they were only closed for one business day following the storm. Many businesses that relied on traditional infrastructure were unable to do work for a week. Not operating for that long while the courts were open for business would have seriously impacted the firm's boom line, not to mention jeopardizing many of its client relationships. Achieving Business Continuity and Innovation with the Cloud The cloud allowed Ayo & Iken to stay in business during one of the worst hurricanes Florida has ever seen. Had the firm been relying on on-premise systems, they would have lost data and all access to calendars, case information, documents and billing systems. They would have been at the mercy of the utilities companies and unable to conduct business until power was restored. Most law offices would suffer significant financial losses from being down for that long. All Clouds are Not the Same Most application soware in the cloud is delivered via a soware-as-a-service (SaaS) model; the law firm subscribes to application services on a per-user basis and populates the application service databases with the firm's data. The application service is leased with the law firm retaining all data ownership but no soware or server ownership. This scalable model allows law firms to benefit from great application services without the hassle of owning, maintaining, upgrading, recovering or managing soware or hardware. There are many permutations of cloud platforms and cloud application vendors who deliver soware for law firms. Two primary models are most likely to be in the path of successful migration to the cloud. Single Vendor SaaS Delivery: There are independent soware vendors who both provide the SaaS application and are responsible for the hosting services. They may utilize an infrastructure-as-a-service vendor such as AWS or Microso while remaining responsible for the entire stack. These types of organizations should be highly veed and preferably are large well-established vendors. SaaS Delivery on HpaPaaS: Say what? High productivity application platform as a service is a category of cloud delivery technologies that provide very high performing, secure and high availability computing platforms. In addition, the platforms are open to independent soware vendors. This allows innovative soware vendors to deploy their solutions on what is essentially diamond-plated infrastructure. The soware vendor can provide unique solutions or known market category soware and the client of that soware can benefit from both the soware and not having to worry about the platform being maintained by the application vendor. The platform is maintained by a major player in the industry. A reliable source of information on hpaPaaS is the Gartner's April 2017 edition of "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High- Productivity Application Platform as a Service." A business interruption can truly hurt a firm's boom line. Even small interruptions can drain finances enough to cause concern while major, catastrophic events can potentially destroy a practice if its leaders have not taken steps to set up business continuity processes. And while catastrophic events certainly highlight the power of cloud-based systems, it does not take a natural disaster for the benefits of the cloud to be clear. By using business continuity as the impetus for rearchitecting your firm to be cloud-based, your firm can eliminate the costs of IT infrastructure and staff, be operating on the latest version of platforms without the disruption of making updates, be able to scale on a moment's notice and offer greater access to important business systems. P2P And while catastrophic events certainly highlight the power of cloud- based systems, it does not take a natural disaster for the benefits of the cloud to be clear.

• Cover