As the rate of cloud adoption by UK law firms rapidly increases, concerns around vendor lock-in become more prevalent, leaving potential cloud-users feeling reluctant to make the migration.
These fears mainly stem from issues regarding loss of control of data and data portability and so it is critical that firms take a careful and calculated approach to finding a Managed Service Provider (MSP) that can minimize these fears by providing ease and flexibility to firms that want to move data between different cloud providers and between on-premise and the cloud.
Building a partnership with an advanced MSP, prior to your move to the cloud, can provide you with a granular and transparent view of cloud computing, in addition to reduced costs and flexible solutions.
- Data Availability
A major concern when it comes to migrating to the cloud is data accessibility and portability. It can be easy to move data to the cloud, but it’s not always so easy getting it back out when you want to leave your cloud contract behind.
Having your information backed up by an MSP to a secondary location, where it can be replicated in real time and easily exported to different storage types and server models, provides easy accessibility of any cloud-based workloads to maintain total authority of your data.
- Cost Transparency
The pricing models of cloud computing can be confusing due to the number of variables that are involved, the details of which aren’t always made clear. For example, whilst in principal a per-user-per-month model sounds attractive, as your firm scales and potentially doubles in size, so will your cost, yet you don’t necessarily need to double all the components of the back-end infrastructure.
Total cost transparency and an understanding of how flexibility can affect cost and infrastructure will simplify your journey to the cloud. Before you begin your migration, your MSP should collaborate closely with you to map out your transition and understand your firm’s longer-term strategy, working with you to forecast the associated costs. Firms need to have clarity from their MSP around their ability to scale up and reallocate resources as required, in order to ensure you never pay for more than you need.
- Customisable Support
The implementation of your ideal cloud-based IT solution should be considered a long-term relationship between your firm and your MSP. The ideal MSP is one that can provide you with the ability to tailor your service to supplement the skills of your in-house team, selecting the level of support you require for each individual element of your IT. This ensures that your support package is designed to meet your unique requirements and that budget is spent intelligently, meaning you’re only paying for the services you’re utilising. Additionally, transferring infrastructure responsibility to a third-party means IT departments can focus their resources on business value, user adoption and system optimisation projects.
At CTS, we provide our clients with access to an infrastructure management service designed to maximise application performance, reduce downtime and facilitate integration between applications.
You can be certain that with the right MSP, you will remain in control of your firm’s cloud journey – from start, finish and beyond.
Contact us to find out how we can support your firm’s move to the cloud.
