Many firms started moving to cloud-based data storage, because it’s easier and usually cheaper than keeping files on physical servers or in file cabinets. As more clients and files accumulate, a firm doesn’t need to create extra office space or digital storage capacity. And with cloud computing, multiple lawyers can collaborate efficiently by adding comments simultaneously on documents. According to the LawPay & MyCase 2022 Legal Industry Report, 81% of law firms use cloud-based software.
But there’s much more to tech expenses than the cloud. Whether your law firm is looking to reduce its cloud costs and/or other tech-related outlays, leaders can learn actionable solutions for managing and optimizing technology health and costs. That way they can maximize the efficiency of the enterprise’s entire tech stack — and deliver measurable value to the bottom line.
DETERMINING TECHNOLOGY HEALTH
Ensuring the stability, reliability and predictability of applications and systems is critical for law firms. Technology performance impacts everything from attorney productivity to client service levels. Even minor degraded performance or intermittent slowdowns can negatively affect firm operations and bottom lines.
However, optimizing the health and efficiency of the underlying technology is complex. Comprehensive workload analysis requires tracking numerous technical and financial metrics over time across the hundreds or thousands of servers and applications. This level of sophistication often exceeds the capabilities of legal IT teams and without expertise in workload analytics, firms cannot derive the full benefits.
Bridging these information and skill gaps is key for law firms to keep pace with the increasing data and business growth. Workload optimization enables legal IT teams to find and gain efficiencies by analyzing the critical workload metrics and mapping them to strategic recommendations required to boost the application performance. By focusing on workload analytics, firms can:
- Identify performance bottlenecks that impact productivity.
- Right-size servers and resources to improve efficiency.
- Consolidate redundant or underutilized tools to reduce costs.
- Identify usage trends to optimize licensing models.
- Determine infrastructure upgrades providing the best ROI.
- Implement data lifecycle management to optimize costs.