January 5, 2021
Looking back, the changes, restructurings, and adjustments we have all had to make throughout the past year have generated a wealth of information about how businesses adapt and what resources are the most valuable during transitions. How have the most resilient companies adapted and created a remote working environment that is secure and sustainable? In October, Gartner released some predictions for trends in data science, making use of the medical data gathered during the pandemic to prepare business leaders for what comes next. Here’s what we found interesting:
What’s On the Horizon?
Gartner predicts that “By 2022, public cloud services will be essential for 90% of data and analytics innovation.” COVID-19 transformed work from home from a luxury to a necessity, and cloud-based resources were the primary tools that could make this happen. Even now that many businesses use cloud-based resources, many still find it hard to maximize the potential of the cloud and use it to their advantage to better understand their business. The report also highlights more widely known benefits of public cloud services such as cost optimization and change and innovation acceleration.
To clarify here, when we say “moving to the cloud” we don’t necessarily mean sending your procurement department off to a cloud service provider like Microsoft or Amazon for a quote. A lot of where that cost optimization comes in is in not having to house servers to run all of your software in-house, and in fact, having your software provider handle the cloud services entirely, so all you have to do is log in on a secure network from any device. Encourage your vendors to offer you cloud based options or look for ones who do.
Keep in mind, for some legacy systems, making a switch to a cloud-based solution may not be an immediate option, so there’s a high chance that the market for cost-optimization tools will expand. New vendors will offer higher-quality analytics and solutions that can maximize savings without compromising performance while offering integrations that ensure multi-cloud consistency. Regardless, there’s a new array of cloud-based supply out there, and if 2020 taught us anything, it’s that demand will only continue to grow.
Cloudy Days Are Coming
Adopting cloud-based solutions is no longer a radical move in the legal industry. Even before the pandemic, many law firms and corporate legal departments had already begun moving to smarter technology. In a 2019 survey conducted by the American Bar Association, 58% percent of the respondents said they were using the cloud which is an increase from 2018.
Most companies also reported that they either were currently or were planning to use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools as the most popular option to transition into cloud services. SaaS scalability and security have been acknowledged as “the savior of enterprises during the pandemic.” Furthermore, SaaS architecture comes with different levels of maturity (check out What Is The SaaS Architecture Maturity Model?) so it’s a feasible option for most, if not all organizations. With most SaaS cloud-based solutions, access controls are in place so that anyone working in the organization can manage their data, updates and maintenance are managed by the provider, and businesses can also consume services based on what they need and have the flexibility to increase or decrease it as circumstances change.
With its great scalability, cost-effectiveness, and the security of remote access, moving to the cloud is a sensible decision for companies that are looking back at 2020 for lessons learned and looking forward to 2021 for planning their next step. If you believe Gartner’s analysis you only have about a year left before everyone catches up and adopts cloud-based solutions, so get ahead of the pack and look for opportunities in the cloud.
InfiniGlobe founder, Mori Kabiri, recognized the trend towards cloud-based architecture a year ago and has therefore worked to make options available for legacy in-house clients, as well as newer cloud-based clients, as well as helping bridge the transition from legacy to cloud-based systems. From achieving and maintaining active ISO:27001 certification on all processes and both cloud-based InfiniGlobe products, IG Insight and Counself, to developing and supporting a wide variety of implementations and cloud-based partners, we’re well versed in the benefits of cloud-based services. We can confidently say that SaaS solutions and cloud-based analytics can have the potential to help legal departments weather the storm in a post-pandemic world.
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