The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1025033
27 WWW.ILTANET.ORG The Cloud's Five Critical Data Management Gaps FEATURES Firms are faced with the need for constant importing and exporting of client data to accommodate data brought in by lateral hires or departing laterals taking clients or maers with them. In either case, be it moving content between hosted systems or importing and exporting content, meeting this challenge is critical. Gap 5: Figuring Out Access: Chargeback and Analytics We want to pay only for what we need and use. Clients also want this; hopefully this is not news. In some hosted content systems pricing is based on per gigabyte storage. Some firms pass this cost along to clients, usually in the areas of litigation support/ediscovery. We will call this Plan A. Most firms, however, are on Plan B. Plan B is eating the cost of hosting client data and allowing it to impact maer profitability. This hit to the margin is compounded when the firm continues hosting the data even aer the maer closes. In addition, firms oen limit themselves to one providers' specific offering or capability, but this is not necessary. Organizations need rich reporting, analytics and the ability to act on them to support information governance, cybersecurity and total quality management programs. If a firm needs to engage with multiple vendors to perform complex queries and reporting with advanced analytics, so be it. These abilities are necessary to analyze how content is used with regard to ethical and regulatory obligations. Welcome to the Age of the Cloud We are entering the age of the cloud, and the benefits of moving to it will accelerate, but we need centralized control over our proliferating content systems. We want choice and we want to apply optimal tools to optimal challenges, but we need data to move fluidly between content systems to service its different audiences along the way. The critical data gaps resulting from moving to the cloud impede this. Provisioning, integrating, securing and governing data have not disappeared simply by moving to the cloud – they have changed. This is the challenge of our generation of IT leaders. P2P We want choice and we want to apply optimal tools to optimal challenges, but we need data to move fluidly between content systems to service its different audiences along the way. The critical data gaps resulting from moving to the cloud impede this.