Rapid recovery of your applications and data is essential when there’s a disruption, whether it’s caused by cyberattack, technology malfunction, human error or natural disaster. The plans, policies and services that you have in place to protect your data are essential to your chances of recovery.
Law firms hold a mass of valuable client data, and with data sets continuously growing, the legal sector is becoming more and more reliant on third-party, cloud-based systems to manage and store their business-critical data.
In this blog, we will explore the advantages of cloud backup as a service, including increased availability and control of data, improved cost efficiency and strengthened disaster preparedness for effective response and business continuity.
Maximise IT Resources
While firms know that they must protect their data, many would prefer to focus their time on more strategic projects central to the business, rather than monitoring the progress of manual backups, reviewing logs, and troubleshooting problems.
Using a cloud-based solution and transferring infrastructure responsibility to a third-party means your IT in-house department can focus their resources on the more strategic aspects of their role, while you continue to maintain complete data visibility and control with quick access to your data backups whenever you need them.
Reducing Total Cost of Ownership
When law firms utilise cloud technology, they can decrease Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in a number of different ways.
Using remote, cloud-based servers removes the need for in-house storage equipment and application requirements, as well as additional costs such as software updates, management and data storage.
The flexibility and scalability of cloud backup solutions means that your support package is designed to meet your firm’s unique requirements and that budget is spent intelligently, so you’re only paying for the services you’re utilising.
Shifting from Capex to Opex
For many firms, the shift from a capital expenditure (Capex) to operational expenditure (Opex) model is one of the key benefits of the cloud model. With an OpEx model, your law firm will gain more flexibility;
- Its pay-as-you-go framework will allow you to more easily predict expenses.
- With cloud backup as a service, you can take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity to pay for only what you need, when you need it.
- You have the ability to scale capacity up and down as your requirements change.
- It frees up valuable resources that would otherwise be spent managing onsite infrastructure and reduces your need to spend money on hardware and software costs.
Achieve Best Practices
When designing for data backup, one of the simplest procedures to follow is known as the “3-2-1 Rule”.
3: Have at least three different copies of your data, backed up over different periods of time to ensure that you can recover from incidents that have affected multiple versions of your data.
2: Store your data on at least two different types of storage media. Storing different copies of your data on the same server is not enough to ensure recovery because, in the case of the failure of that server, all copies would become unavailable.
1: Keep one version of your backup in an off-site location, such as another office or a cloud-based data centre.
Improve Disaster Recovery
The use of tapes as a data backup solution has been around for decades but has become antiquated due to the obstacles it poses, such as the high setup costs, slow access speed and the high margin for human error.
Cloud backup as a service will immediately and significantly improve your law firm’s response time to any disaster or incident that effects data availability. With the “3-2-1 Rule”, you will have versions of your business-critical data stored in an off-site, cloud-based location, meaning that you can access and recover it quickly and easily.
Partnering with a specialist service provider that also offers Disaster Recovery as a Service will provide you with efficient and cost-efficient disaster recovery, with agreed Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and use of best of breed technology and validation testing to ensure guaranteed recovery of applications and data.
Leverage the Knowledge and Expertise of a Legal Sector Specialist
Choosing to work with a recognised, fully resourced security specialist is a hard-headed business decision, taken by law firms to avoid data loss, minimise downtime and protect both their reputation and their financial well-being at a manageable cost.
Specialist suppliers to the legal sector understand the regulatory environment and the challenges firms encounter, and work in partnership with their clients to align their technology use with their business strategy, delivering robust and compliant solutions that improve productivity, enable flexible working and mitigate risk. They will augment a firm’s existing in-house support team, moving their core IT systems to a high-availability environment where it can be proactively managed and monitored.
CTS, a legal sector specialist, has in-depth experience of managing data security and disaster recovery, strong knowledge of the compliance requirements that law firms face, and have close relationships with legal technology vendors, such as Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and iManage.
