03.19 Legal Briefs - LSAG Newsletter

Overcoming challenges to the new digital status quo Each of these challenges could require a full in-house team to manage. Instead, many law firms have begun searching for assistance from managed services providers (MSPs). MSPs have the ability to provide services spanning from workload assessment, through vendor evaluation, and implementation of hybrid IT environments. When evaluating a centralized solution to build legal IT infrastructure, most MSPs choose to place client environments in a colocation facility. Colocation data centers provide a centralized point to house dedicated servers, while providing access to all the cloud, network, and IT vendors a legal firm needs to build a holistic, hybrid IT solution. The benefit is twofold: 1. The physical data center provides the scalable space, power, and cooling a business needs to host its computing hardware, with SLA guarantees around uptime and performance. 2. Interconnected colocation data centers provide dedicated access to cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, and IBM on-site. These direct connections enable a business to gain all the benefits of redundant, private cloud connectivity (think: increased security and performance) at a fraction of the cost of building out

a private network from an on-premises server closet. Added bonus: there are several network providers on-site competing for your business to provide competitive rates for the rest of your WAN solution. What does this look like in action? Ask Paul Hastings. Leading law firms like Paul Hastings use data centers as the core of their operations because they can monitor, test, and support their entire global infrastructure end-to-end from a single location. The strategy has helped the firm save significant financial resources by consolidating its physical IT footprint to four strategically chosen data centers and improve its overall risk profile, system availability, and security of confidential client and corporate information in the process. The world around the legal industry is rapidly evolving and law firms far and wide are beginning to feel it. The firms who embrace the change — and take advantage of the variety of new technologies and the experts to run them — will gain a competitive advantage never before possible in the old industry model. Those who don’t will be left wondering how they’ll compete, if they can at all.

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The world around the legal industry is rapidly evolving and law firms far and wide are beginning to feel it.

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