The Cloud

The Cloud is a wonderfully popular term at the moment. It has achieved buzzword status and shows no signs of becoming unfashionable yet. However we recently discovered that when pressed very few Partners had the first idea of what it meant. This is hardly surprising when a good few of our more technical associates couldn’t agree on a set meaning either.

We believe the cloud represents a new way of thinking rather than a tangible item that you can add to your IT rooms.

The most commonly accepted definition of the cloud is as follows “Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid.” This is probably accurate but could do with a little clarification.

In it’s simplest form the term Cloud means moving your in-house IT systems (Email, Practice Management and Accounting servers normally) to a data center location where they are installed on a large array of servers. When the demand is light your servers consume minimal resources and thus cost less to run. When demand is high your servers consume additional resources that are allocated to them as they are needed. This means you never pay for space or power you don’t need. In addition to this many companies are offering to manage your systems for you. This means that the company in question will deal with any issues or changes that you may need made for you. This outsourcing often allows IT budgets to be cut and sometimes expensive IT staffing to be reduced.

Utilising the cloud as a way to decentralise your systems can bring great benefits. Many providers are happy to manage anything from your email to your practice management servers freeing up your in house IT staff to focus on other roles or just reducing your monthly costs.

Remote workers often notice very large speed and reliability increases when servers are moved from the relatively slow and unreliable connections present inside offices to the high availability to the data center and the cloud.

The popularity of hosted and managed solutions is leading to a large rise in what are known as virtual law firms. These firms exist sometimes without premises or sometimes with small offices, with the majority of their staff working from home. These firms achieve a huge saving in rent and rates and are able to stay nimble in an ever changing market place.

Gideon Squared are able to provide cloud solutions for your law firm, enabling you to streamline your business, improve reliability and ensure your essential applications are managed in the most efficient and secure way possible. If you would like to find out more about the cloud or how it could help to streamline your business then we would be very happy to come and have a chat and see if we can find a solution that suits your needs.

Drop us a line and we can have a chat.