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13 I L T A N E T . O R G Y es, this is another cloud article. But this one might be different from others you have read, because it looks at these topics from a law firm IT perspective, whilst analysing the cloud adoption plans of around 100 of the largest law firms in the US, UK and Europe. It's all well and good to say that cloud is the way forward, but why is that? After decades of on-premise installations and firm-specific customisations, why are vendors now so keen to move their clients to cloud services, and why are so many law firms moving? Why do people ask about your cloud strategy? Why does it even matter, and do we all actually agree what the cloud is? What is cloud? As 'cloud' means many things, for the purposes of this article we have settled on the NIST definitions of infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service, which you will find at the end of this article. Firms may of course operate hybrid models involving any or all of these approaches. Additionally, deployment may be private (where an instance is created for the exclusive use of one client) or public (where multiple clients share the same environment). It is often assumed that Infrastructure as a Service is private and Software as a Service is public, but that is not always the case - there are several examples of public (shared) IaaS in law firms, and also single-tenant (private) SaaS. How big is the market? The combined revenues of the Global 100 firms in 2020 totalled $120bn (£90m). If you estimate a 4% IT budget across that group, with 20% of that being spent on cloud services, you reach a figure of $960m (£720m). There are of course arguments as to why the actual value might be far smaller than that, and the potential far larger, so run your own numbers and reach your own conclusion! By comparison, the analyst firm Canalys reports that the worldwide cloud services market grew by 35% in the first quarter of 2021 to $41bn (£30bn) – if that growth was sustained for the whole year, it would lead to an annual figure of $270bn (£200bn). AWS and Azure account for half of that market on their own. What are the benefits? There is no shortage of hype in this space. Despite that, there is plenty of potential. To what extent any of these apply will depend on the type of cloud you are looking at (Iaas/SaaS, public/private) and the relative complexity of a firm's entire estate. • Infrastructure savings: less onsite equipment to manage, needing fewer specialist staff, and less (or no) office floorspace being used as datacentre. • Cost savings: IaaS may be cheaper or more flexible than building it yourself on-premise, and multi- tenant public cloud may offer a lower price point through economies of scale, either directly or as the infrastructure beneath a vendor's SaaS offering. • Time savings: public cloud and SaaS applications should offer reduced time to implement, and in the case of multi-tenanted SaaS, faster access to new features as the vendor has a single platform to upgrade. The ability to configure rather than totally customise may stop attempts to rewrite software which in turn should speed up deployment. Cloud can provide a path away from past customisations to immediately supportable solutions that can scale.

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