P2P

12 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 your oven and present it for consumption – based on the capabilities that have been provided by your IaaS provider. PaaS is not something frequently seen in the legal vertical but, with the availability of on-demand scalable web services and cloud database engines, this category of cloud offering will likely increase in popularity. With PaaS, the pizza analogy centers around delivery. The pizza is assembled, cooked in someone else's oven, and brought to your home, ready to be eaten. All you must do is provide the soda and serve on your dining table. You are responsible for the presentation of the pizza and the drink – in technology terms, you are responsible for the application with which a user interfaces (the served pizza on your dining table) and the data associated with that application (the soda that supported the pizza you served). There are many SaaS solutions that law firms consume today. The most common ones are Exchange Online for email, cloud accounting systems, cloud document management systems, etc. In the pizza world, with SaaS, you visit your favorite pizza place and all you have to do is stuff your face full of delicious crust, cheese, and sauce and pay your bill on the way out. Your favorite pizza place assembled the pizza, cooked it in their oven using their electricity/gas, and served it to you with soda on their dining table. You did not need to provide anything for the meal except for yourself to consume it and your wallet to pay. It's the same with a SaaS cloud model – you are responsible only for using the application or service for whatever purpose it was intended and paying for your consumption of that SaaS solution. Another way this can be considered is illustrated below. The analogy components remain largely the same but with some of them shifted to better align with what many people would think as infrastructure components. For example, the utilities one would associate with preparing a pizza (the electricity/gas) and appliance used to cook the pizza (the oven) are equated to the "utilities" associated with hosting virtual servers and applications (the physical server hardware, storage, and networking) and the "appliance" used to host virtual servers and F E A T U R E S

• Cover