P2P

23 I L T A N E T . O R G • Option 1: Source all the individual ingredients yourself. Grow the wheat, raise the chickens for eggs and then make the cake yourself. • Option 2: Go to the grocery store, choose the quality of ingredients you want, and then make the cake from scratch. • Option 3: Go to a fancy bakery and purchase a gourmet cake made to spec. Few people would choose the first option. Instead, most would either buy the ingredients needed to make it from scratch or turn to the experts and buy the gourmet cake. The same concepts apply to creating your IT infrastructure: • Option 1: Build all your technology components yourself, hire staff to oversee everything and handle your own upgrades, maintenance and end-user support. • Option 2: Outsource various components of your IT function to different specialist providers, such as help desk and cloud services, and incorporate them together to create your IT environment. • Option 3: Outsource nearly everything to a provider – including infrastructure management, hardware and software personnel and cloud services – and keep only high-level, line-of-business IT and strategy in-house. The first option is not viable for nearly any law firm – firms aren't in the business of building technology. Attempting to do so would be highly inefficient and likely ineffective. Standing up and deploying servers are not something firms should be wasting their time on when experts are readily available who know how to do it and how to optimize it, perform such tasks every day and can hit the ground running with zero learning curve. A server won't be better just because you spun it up yourself. In fact, you'll just be wasting time and energy if you try. The smarter path is to buy SaaS tools and packages, outsource entirely or utilize a hybrid approach while letting someone else manage everything for you to identified SLAs and metrics. You can then focus your attention on the specific line of business applications that you need to keep your organization running. Even though you're keeping these specific applications in-house, you don't have to worry about where they reside and can rest assured that your users can always get tech support, your infrastructure is always online and you can always have the servers and storage capabilities you need. Unless it is your hobby, there's no need to try to be a farmer and a pastry chef when you can get a better cake by going to the store. Critical Considerations If you're still undecided whether to take your IT infrastructure needs in-house or outsource them, there are a few key considerations to help you make your choice. The first is cost. There's a common misconception that it's more expensive to outsource services than to take them in-house. That argument fails to consider the realities of performing functions in-house – things like hiring full- time employees for expertise you only occasionally need. When you outsource, overlooked costs like planning, the ability to scale, licensing, expertise, turnover and attrition are absorbed without you even seeing or worrying about them. Think again of the cake analogy. You might believe

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