The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/11430
challenges of what do with legacy data and application functionality. The responses to these challenges seem to have made sense. Both Google and Microsoft were aggressive in providing migration tools and services to assist firms with migration of all e-mail and document-related data to their cloud offerings. These services could be paid as one-time expenses or incorporated into the contract with the service providers. Application functionality was the bigger challenge for those of us in legal IT, as we have some unique requirements. Thankfully, the modular approach of application development, which started after the release of the iPad and Google tablets, has allowed third parties to build hooks into standard applications. The three vendors with offerings for legal IT also made strategic acquisitions of other legal software vendors to round out product offerings, acquire development talent and enhance their bases of installed customers. Security in the Cloud There were some very significant hurdles that infrastructure providers had to overcome to be able to win the market share they now have in legal IT: data security, privacy and reliability. Solution providers also had to address concerns with legacy data and application functionality. The privacy concern was the easiest to address. Under pressure from the industry, Congress passed a law in 2011 that gave the same protections to data stored in the cloud as data stored locally. Physical access to data was easy to control with hardened data centers. Electronic access to data was addressed by the use of data encryption, second-factor authentication and relatively robust audit logs, which are all now industry standards. Some concerns about the security of data stored in the cloud still remain, however. Since many firms are using a few main service providers, attacks on these service providers can have a profound impact on many firms. There have been a few such attacks, and service providers have suffered outages, but there have not been any reports of actual data breaches that I am aware of. That said, until all IPv4 interfaces are disabled, and all firms are using the secure interface capabilities of IPv6, this is a real risk. For that reason, only those service providers offering private network capability and requiring IPv6 secure connections from outside that network are adequate from a security standpoint. Outside of a few minor outages, reliability of these service providers has largely been very good, as they have been able to architect highly redundant systems. While they charge a slightly higher price point for this redundancy than for their basic systems, most firms consider it a worthwhile investment and have been well served by it. Beyond the Cloud, the Sky’s the Limit So where do we now stand in 2020? Well, most large firms now use three cloud providers: a solution provider for network and telephony services; a solution provider for applications; and an infrastructure provider for other data, miscellaneous 76 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer internal applications and, in some cases, legacy data the firm chose not to migrate. The Google platform has shown to be the most popular, as the application interfaces have made the server side software unimportant. Google’s offering is also provided at a more competitive price point. Internal IT staff are still responsible for first and second-level user support, custom development of applications and management of the service providers. Systems are accessed largely via mobile tablet devices. Applications and data automatically synchronize with the cloud, are modular and built on the framework originally popularized with the iPhone and Android OS. This stroll down memory lane is illuminating, and there are some exciting developments that I think you will likely see in coming years in terms of wireless data and service providers. 5G networks have largely served the purpose, but they still don’t reach everywhere. With further consolidation among network backbone providers globally and the privatization of the aerospace industry, it is likely you’ll see future networks being satellite-based, with supplementation from terrestrial equipment to ensure 100 percent coverage across the globe. In addition, history has shown that where there are opportunities for efficiency, mergers often happen. It’s likely that we will see a merging of cloud service providers over the next 10 years, with the end result being that most firms will be working with one cloud service provider for all services, presumably at a better price point than currently. We’ll see what the future holds beyond 2020. ILTA Scott Bravi is the Chief Information Officer for Arnold & Porter LLP where he is responsible for the firm’s IT, litigation support and records management functions. He has worked in legal IT since 2001 and is a non-practicing attorney. In his role as CIO, Scott is well known for delivering cutting edge technology in a highly efficient way, having trimmed 20 percent of his firm’s annual IT budget without reduction in staff. A frequent speaker on topics related to legal IT, Scott has a track record of building top-performing technology teams and helping his firm stay ahead of the technology curve. He can be reached at scott. bravi@aporter.com.