Law firms moving to the cloud – common mistakes

Law firms moving to the cloud

Discussions around whether a business should have a Cloud strategy have been replaced by those around how the change should be made. And whilst there are many undeniable advantages to Cloud provision, the following common mistakes should be avoided when moving to the cloud.

Common mistakes

  • Lack of planningBefore migrating anything, you need to consider security, management and finance implications for your law firm. Audit these areas to determine which critical features you will migrate, the order in which they will move and how long will be needed to embed before moving to the next feature.
  • The audit will also establish a ‘chain of governance’, making it clear exactly who in your businesses is responsible for what aspect of the migration. Finally, a detailed plan set down in writing will create a record that can be used to monitor progress and a reference point if problems arise.
  • Sticking with legacy systems – Don’t simply migrate legacy solutions without considering if a Cloud-specific solution might work better for your business. Many Cloud solutions offer massively increased functionality and assessing before migrating could save a lot of future time and expense.
  • Your people will continue to use the old functionality of legacy systems even after switching to more efficient Cloud solutions with more features unless you plan for this prior to the shift. Compare your existing systems and Cloud-based alternatives, then plan training for your people to take full advantage.
  • Focus only on costFor many, migration to the Cloud is driven by the desire to cut costs through increased efficiency and productivity, but a focus on finance that dictates the service provider can be a problem.
  • Whilst competition may drive down prices, it still pays to interrogate the providers you’re considering to assess their offer in terms of security, compliance, performance and uptime, not just cost.
  • Leaving it all to the provider – Your chosen service provider cannot handle absolutely everything, they will only be responsible for those factors over which they have control, like your service infrastructure.
  • Issues such as cybersecurity will still be in your hands and it’s vital before migration, to build a full picture of where the responsibilities are divided between your business and the Cloud provider.
  • Migrating everything – Migrating to the Cloud, then working backwards to discover which applications can’t deliver the performance or user experience expected is wasteful and could damage your business.
  • Your plan should involve analysing your applications and determining whether they will require complex integration to be utilised within the Cloud, then you know what not to shift before doing so.
  • Continuity and disaster planningCloud provides uptime percentages that conventional infrastructure could never hope to achieve, but downtime cannot be ignored.

When serious problems occur, you will need a plan to recover your business-critical processes and data without relying on the provider’s automatic solutions, using the same systems and safeguards you relied upon prior to Cloud migration.

Finally

If you are still assessing the benefits of Cloud migration for all or part of your business, then a Cloud enablement workshop will help identify any of the likely issues, long before they become a serious problem during or after your migration. Use your time wisely and plan every step carefully.

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