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B uzzwords in Legal Tech… they are plentiful and the bane of many IT leaders' existence. But some buzzwords hang around and it's worth speculating how they will impact technology and life as we know it. And others –– take the cloud for example –– never go away and become the "new normal." Well, let's offer up another buzzworthy topic making the rounds, causing both excitement and a fair share of confusion and mischaracterization in the process: platformization. If you consider that every software "solution" and application has suddenly morphed into a platform, the leap to platformization, and the idea that "everybody's doing it" is not so far off. Platformization DNA Let's take a closer look at platformization specific to the cloud and legal tech. What are the characteristics that define platformization? What are the building blocks of a cloud platform? Native solutions: Consider a cloud platform with robust core technologies, and the many solutions or applications hosted by the platform. To reach platformization, all solutions or applications must be 100% native to the platform's technologies. They must share common storage, a common search engine, common cryptography, common ethical walls and DLP, a common user experience, common security and authentications, common cryptography, common certifications, and a common API. To be a native solution, the application is in essence "biologically" connected to the platform. No solution can be self-sufficient or have its own core technologies, and all core technologies must reside only in the platform. This means: Solutions provide the user experience, while the platform provides the core technologies. Not only are the solutions native to the platform, but the platform itself is SaaS-native. Meaning, it was "born" in the cloud and runs nowhere else but in the cloud. 1+1+1 = 1: Platformization requires that there is one — and only one — service running in the cloud. This is often called the "power of one." While the service can be segregated into multiple geographies for geo-aware content storage for compliance reasons, the single service and single cloud ensures that any digital asset can be transparently retrieved by any authorized user anywhere in the world. Solutions often need access to other cloud technologies, such as Microsoft Azure, and platformization specifies that this access is done via the native platform, and not directly from the solution. Platformization requires a clear delineation between platform and solutions via a well- defined API layer. Robust APIs provide core technology access to internal and third-party applications along with very strong encryption and security features. The "power of one" provides commonality of the single platform, single API, and single service and cloud. "Platformization requires that there is one — and only one — service running in the cloud." 41 I L T A N E T . O R G

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