By Legal Futures Associate CTS
Many law firms now have a complex IT landscape, with a mix of cloud and on-premise resources. Here are 5 ways to identify and minimise cost inefficiencies, making your budget go further.
1. Put your workloads in the right place
Static workloads, such as Practice and Case Management Systems, are often most suited to private cloud due to the level of resource, and therefore cost, being consistent, whereas AI can be placed in public cloud, with its pay-per-use pricing model, which allows for the scaling down of resources during non-peak times.
2. Store your data effectively
Your firm can optimise your data storage costs by opting for a tiered hot and cold storage system. All data that you need to be able to access immediately and regularly is placed in hot storage, which has a higher storage cost but lower access cost. On the other hand, cool storage, with lower storage costs but higher access costs, can be used for older content or archived data.
3. Monitor all resources in a single pane of glass
Using a single monitoring system across your hybrid cloud environment not only decreases manual work required by your IT team to switch between monitoring tools but will also result in reduced downtime and degradation as performance can be identified at a glance.
Additionally, by tagging your cloud resources, such as applying tags based on environment and applications, you can easily identify and better understand how resources are being consumed, meaning that management of cloud costs is more effective.
4. Identify over-provisioned resources
Cloud monitoring dashboards allow you to add customised widgets, which could be used to pinpoint unused or over-provisioned resources. This functionality not only enables your law firm to manage your monthly cloud bill more easily, but also to make informed decisions when it comes to virtual machine right-sizing or the removal of idle or unused resources.
5. Plan change carefully
Cloud solutions are ever evolving, so you must continuously re-evaluate and adapt your strategy. As you make changes, it’s critical to have an in-depth understanding of all cost implications. It’s a complex area where unexpected and spiralling costs can easily occur.
Working with a cloud specialist mitigates these issues and enables you to accurately forecast expenditure, factoring in related costs such as storage, management, security and data transfer. This way, you can be confident your budget is spent intelligently and that you remain in control of your firm’s cloud journey – from start, finish and beyond.
