Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/4636
www.iltanet.org Infrastructure Technologies 29 the future is bright in the cloud EMERGENCE OF COMMUNITY CLOUDS If public clouds like Amazon EC2 and others are inappropriate for core legal infrastructure because of security, audit rights, data location and other factors, and if private data centers are too inefficient, where does the answer lie? One area to look might be "community clouds," which lie somewhere between private and public infrastructures. A community cloud is a shared physical resource, divided among a like-minded set of customers with similar concerns and goals. Because the vendor is addressing a specific market segment exclusively, he or she is sure to provide service-level agreements appropriate to that set of users. This includes all the concerns one typically hears as barriers to using cloud services. Another description of community cloud that might cause less angst with attorneys is simply "a shared virtual data center." Community clouds are auditable, secure and transparent in operations and procedures. They have to be, or vendors who offer them would be out of business. They are also flexible, efficient, offer a pay-as-you-go model and, by sharing resources across a pool of similar users, are able to achieve economies of scale beyond any single firm. Additionally, PaaS offerings crafted specifically to address the needs of that discrete • Standardization and simplification of backup, data protection and recovery across the firm Disaster recovery through a cloud-based approach can help firms save as much as 50 to 80 percent of the costs of private, redundant offsite facilities. BEYOND COSTS The changed economics of cloud computing are significant for firms wanting to do more with less. From a disaster recovery perspective, this means that rather than focus on the protection of a few core systems, firms are able to take an enterprise-wide approach and replicate all data, applications and systems to redundant offsite facilities. While this might sound like overkill from a recovery perspective, it means that all other forms of backup can then be eliminated, greatly simplifying management overhead and further reducing software costs. BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DATA RECOVERY AS A MIGRATION STRATEGY If your long-term vision is to perform a gradual, low-risk migration to cloud infrastructure, a focus on business continuity will allow you to achieve this in a nondisruptive way while your IT team builds confidence in the vendor and the facility. As core services in your primary facilities approach the time when hardware needs to be refreshed, they can be started on demand in the cloud with a minimum of disruption to the firm. Business continuity can be the beginning of a gradual migration to cloud computing and what might ultimately be a superior, less costly infrastructure for law firms. ILTA