Abundant Opportunities In The Cloud Await Lawyers
The cloud presents many opportunities for businesses everywhere, and a law firm can equally find business enhancing qualities by utilizing the many opportunistic features of the cloud. Along with far improved opportunities such as flexibility and accessibility come a long list of applications to help improve the firm business, and of course security is always an issue when dealing with such sensitive data as attorneys and their law firms deal with on a daily basis. There are many questions that need to be answered. How secure is the cloud? Is data loss a legit issue? What about secure backups for private data? Should third-party vendors be used to fill in the missing gaps in cloud services?
Read on- all of these questions can be answered below.
Read on- all of these questions can be answered below.
Cloud Opportunities:
- Accessibility: As many companies have realized, the world is going mobile. Smartphones, tablets and laptop use are quickly replacing desktops for company business. For the busy lawyer on the go, the cloud presents accessibility from practically anywhere.
- Applications: There are a number of SaaS and PaaS applications that can improve operational tasks such as time management, project management, case files, billing, and creating, editing and storing documents and photographs- and this can be all be completed from the lawyer's current location by mobile connections.
- Flexibility: As the entire law firm's business is no longer restricted to a desktop computer, the law firm can have much greater control over current cases, upcoming cases, contacting clients, reaching out to prospective new clients, as well as keeping up with employees and clients. There are a number of cloud services that are extremely handy to use but they are not compatible with each other. There are third-party solutions such as cloudHQ that can synchronize all data between the different services. This can be extremely helpful for a lawyer working on a project on Evernote and needs the client to help update the document, but the client uses a different cloud service such as Google Apps. CloudHQ provides automatic, continuous synchronization between the services, so the same document can be updated in real-time by both client and attorney.
- Security: For lawyers, most of their data is sensitive and must be protected securely. Many cloud services provide adequate protection such as strong encryption and advanced authentication measures. But there is always the chance, even though it is a minute chance, of data loss. This is usually due to user error, but there are other factors such as accidental deletion or misplacement of files, malicious deletion by a hacker or disgruntled employee, or data corruption due to server malfunction. A secure backup is a necessity, and cloudHQ provides a solution for this as well. With the continuous replication of data between cloud services, this ensures that even if data becomes lost, deleted or corrupted, there will always be a backup on a separate cloud account. So not only does this provide a secure backup, this also helps in case the cloud service the lawyer is working on happens to have the servers go down for awhile. Normally, the lawyer would have to wait for the servers to regain online status before resuming work, but with cloudHQ, the lawyer can simply switch to one of the other cloud services that are synced together, and continue working on the same document or files. Once the other server comes online again, cloudHQ automatically updates and replicates the revised data so there is always the same data in all services.
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