Peer to Peer Magazine

25 WWW.ILTANET.ORG The Cloud's Five Critical Data Management Gaps FEATURES many cloud systems, client-maer identifiers are, at best, optional metadata; when lawyers and other professionals provision maers in those systems today, they do not typically assign the crucial client-maer numbers. Losing this metadata creates critical data management gaps that neuter a firm's ability to manage, secure, govern and provide cost allocation for their data. Let's take a look at five critical data management gaps. Gap 1: Tracking Where Matter Content Is Being Stored Having data dispersed among various cloud providers can quickly become problematic. Without knowing where all client data resides firms will not be able to govern and secure it in line with client expectations, nor satisfy legal hold requirements or records retention policies. This is bad. Law firms and legal departments should start with the maer equivalent of a data map: a single directory or file plan of all maers and engagements detailing all documents and other client data for each maer and which cloud providers contain them. This map should include the ability to define any desired metadata or profile data to track those maers, enabling firms to categorize client data and beer control it. Ideally, the map would be full-text searchable so that maers can be easily located. Firms typically have systems integrated into their intake process, so hopefully integrating new information into the map would be part of an automatic workflow. To that end, it is important to understand the firm's intake process and enable some semblance of automation that incorporates or at least accommodates each of the various content repositories that may be used to store client data. Gap 2: Client Confidentiality and Ethical Obligations Beer security for content is one of the most appealing benefits of the cloud, but protecting content repositories from external actors is a different animal than managing and providing access on a granular security level to meet client confidentiality and ethical requirements. Add in the complex rules and workflow requirements to provide a "need-to-know" security Open Season for Cloud Apps Clients have given their law firms permission to catch up with the rest of enterprise business and go cloud. This means it is open season for cloud applications and legal service providers are headed for a whole new world - transforming the role of legal IT along the way. Our collective decision to trust third party providers to secure, manage, maintain, backup and ensure the continuity of our respective cloud systems and data is, to say the least, new in legal. Not long ago the fear mongering in legal was all about the cloud, and especially the improbability of its security. Things have changed. One of the benefits of the cloud is choice. The cloud gives us more of it, and choice is good. In law firms and legal departments, choice allows for optimizing technology selection to the needs of users. We want to provide our lawyers with the optimal tools for their needs and to facilitate the wide range of tools preferred by individual clients. Oen we not only want to do these things, we must do them. Choice helps with this, and where there is opportunity there is a legal tech, venture capital-backed start-up ready to fill the need. Is this good news for law firms and legal departments? Yes. Law firms and legal departments must operate more fluidly both internally and in how they serve clients and win new business, so it makes sense for them to leverage the dynamism and flexibility of cloud solutions. In addition to the growing use of Microso Office 365, firms are increasingly adopting cloud or SaaS (soware-as-a-service) vendors for document management systems (DMS), deal rooms, extranets, ediscovery, litigation support and more. But. In managing all of these sources, we need to ensure that documents can move fluidly across systems and that we still apply security, retention and legal hold consistently. And so we face the great challenge of open season for the cloud: new complexity. Specifically this complexity: IT teams' ability to manipulate data in on-premise systems relied heavily on the use of SQL to manage and integrate their various applications and systems inside a firewall. This capability is lost when moving to the cloud, period. SQL functionality for "DIY" management is gone. For KEITH LIPMAN Keith Lipman, CEO and cofounder of Prosperoware, is a thought leader in the area of information management and the transformation of legal practice. Keith has twice been honored by ILTA as a Vendor Thought Leader of the Year; Prosperoware has been an Innovative Solution Provider of the Year finalist. Keith earned his BA, JD, and MBA from Temple University. Without knowing where all client data resides firms will not be able to govern and secure it in line with client expectations, nor satisfy legal hold requirements or records retention policies.

• Cover