Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/4636
www.iltanet.org Infrastructure Technologies 27 plant at Niagara Falls that sent the electricity much farther and covered a much greater area. It is the same with the economic benefits of cloud computing. It is estimated that large data centers can purchase power, network bandwidth and hardware for one-fifth to one-seventh the price of medium-sized customers. This, more than any other factor, presents an irreversible trend away from private data centers and toward clouds. BENEFITS OF CLOUDS • Cost Savings Estimates vary as to how much an organization can save by moving to clouds. The potential comes down to a few factors including how much over-provisioning currently exists, distributed versus centralized architecture, the state of virtualization in the firm, investments in disaster recovery facilities and other factors. For services like disaster recovery, savings between 50 and 80 percent are achievable over the lifetime investment of infrastructure services. Plus, avoiding capital expenses is an attractive feature of clouds. • Rapid Global Provisioning Many firms are currently hindered in their desire to deliver needed services to users. By tapping into a readily available global infrastructure under the pay-as- you-go model, this standoff between business needs and IT's ability to deliver can be reduced to a minimum. Moreover, once deployed under the cloud model, firms are not tied to the investment as with private hardware. Service levels can be adjusted or eliminated on demand just as easily as they can be deployed. • Elasticity The ability to adjust service to match demand presents economic as well as functional benefits. Most firms have experienced a level of this — moving to virtualization internally without impacting the bottom line — as they are still tied to the investment in the underlying hardware, but with reduced quantity. The cloud model matches elasticity with cost, or put differently, breaks the costly alliance between capacity and provisioning. • Ability to Simplify and Refocus One of the overlooked benefits of clouds is that by outsourcing what have essentially become commodity functions like storage and hardware maintenance, the internal IT team is able to focus on more strategic initiatives that bring competitive advantage to the firm, such as Web 2.0 client-facing application developments. CLOUD CONCERNS Despite the benefits, concerns remain about protecting highly sensitive client data. Objections to cloud computing for law firms tend to fall under these main concerns: • It's outside the control of the firm • There is an inability to specify where data is, and how it's protected • The data isn't secure One cannot begin to address these concerns without first breaking the term cloud computing down into more specific aspects and then looking at each in context.