Peer to Peer Magazine

35 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Lost In The Fog FEATURES GREG GLIDDEN Greg Glidden is currently employed by Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings LLP as a SharePoint Architect, responsible to multiple environments including on-premises, Office 365, and Azure. Over the past decade as a Technology Consultant and SharePoint Evangelist, Greg has advised clients on emerging Cloud technologies, Collaboration Platforms, and Electronic Content Management. Prior to succumbing to the dark side, his former vocation was operations management focused on project management and strategic analysis. He is currently volunteering with ILTA as a member of the Practice Management Content Coordinating Team. Just a Normal Conversation It started as an ordinary evening conversation with my wife, a very tech savvy aorney with nearly 20 years' experience, about moving content from her old laptop to a new machine. We all know it can be a time-consuming pain to move files from one location to another, in her case moving almost a terabyte from one machine to another. My years of Electronic Content Management (ECM) and cloud services knowledge gushed forth advice on how to save her time and make it easy going forward. I was confident the cloud was the answer. The conversation expanded into practice files, which led to more questions, and then I realized I was hearing the same concerns that I've been hearing for years. Although technologists have become immersed in the philosophy of cloud solutions, we still encounter the contest to communicate that conviction. First let me say my wife is right; I listened to her concerns and understand her perspective. So, with that mandatory disclaimer in place, this is a summary of our conversation. Wait, if I move everything to the cloud, I have to pay an annual fee? And then I have to keep paying every year to keep my files there for the next 20- plus years of my practice? The annual fee will go up over time. How many thousands of dollars is this going to end up costing? Is this is going to end up like what happened with music? I've gone from owning tapes, to CDs, to MP3s, and now we pay for a streaming service just to listen to music, but I don't own anything anymore. If I want to listen to the digital music I own in the car or on my phone, I have to pay a service to be able to access it. Is that going to happen to my files? And what about the ownership of my files? And access? Will this end up where I can't access my files anywhere but that service? Or what if the service I use becomes obsolete? What happens if I can't connect to the service when I need to? What's my recourse if the cloud loses my data? If I decide to take my files to another service, will it be compatible? Are they going to extort more money from me to get my files back someday? How do I know that I will not have to pay for extra services to retrieve my own data because the file type changes in the future? I can buy a 1TB hard drive for less than the annual service fee to keep my documents on forever. Or I can use a flash drive and carry what I need with me. I like having a tangible manifestation of my content, even if it's not a stack of papers anymore. Plus, I don't need access to ALL my documents ALL the time. I'm not going to instantly need to access a brief from 20 years ago. I know what I'm working on now. If I need to access it that way, I can use the free version of Dropbox. Stop. Breathe… I spent years as a consultant evangelizing the benefits of ECM and cloud solutions but faced with the comprehensive reasons not to use a cloud service, I was considering why I'd pay for it too. But don't run off and cancel your firm's cloud subscriptions yet. The Fog Concerns over moving to the cloud are not new. Cloud solutions have been around for years, but for many of us, adoption seemed to progress lethargically. Despite the expected value in moving to cloud solutions, there was a general procrastination in implementation because of uncertainty in adoption, cost, and administration. When cloud solutions were implemented, users were slow to recognize the value of uploading a document to a cloud storage solution to share it rather than quickly emailing the document as an aachment. Users were resistant to convert from their existing file shares to what they perceived as unproven or cumbersome cloud solutions. It is just human nature -- habits and behaviors incline towards the status quo instead of innovation. Administrators are still faced with uncertainty of how to select, migrate, and manage cloud solutions.

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