Sulija, who was with IBM before coming to Dye & Durham, one of the summit’s sponsors, pointed out that those who move to the cloud just “for the sake of moving to the cloud” are not necessarily taking advantage of all its features. “Operating costs are important,” Sulija said, “but agility is why we are taking things to the cloud.”
He added: “Imagine a world with 90 desktop applications, and you need to deploy an update to all your users. That’s a painful process. So, when a customer calls, and we start to talk about a key feature they would like, in our practice management software, we can deploy [those updates] within hours.”
In fact, with some of the firm’s most advanced teams, Sulija says that when a new software developer starts, “we would actually like them to see them deploy something to production on their first day – innovation is also about speed and getting there faster than your competitor.” Emphasizing that agility helps make for a “very easy sales pitch . . . certainly with our customer base of law firms.”
Another element of moving to the cloud with a third-party provider, says Sulija, is resiliency and the ability to access back-ups when needed and not have to worry that there is no one in-house available. In the latter case, “suddenly, you don’t have a backup, and you can’t recover [the data],” he says. “Resiliency is really important.”
Panellists at this session noted that cloud computing is becoming integral for law firms and legal departments, providing mobility, efficiency and cost-effectiveness if used to its full potential. New to the world of cloud solutions are cloud-native platforms.