Another trend that we are seeing, and I started talking about this two years ago. Where I said in three to five years every one of you here in the audience is going to host your service in the Cloud and people shook their heads and said: “No I’m never going to touch the Cloud”. But it’s here and it’s happening and even the major firms, these firms that employ 3, 4, 5 thousand people around the world are now wanting there service and their solutions in the Clouds, because they no longer want to manage their hardware and servers and the problems, not to mention the ransomware, the antivirus and all other software that need managing. So they’re now outsourcing that. Yes they have to pay a fee to host the servers but it’s a lot cheaper than paying someone to manage those servers.
So the benefits you get from hosting, no hardware costs because the server is simply hosted in the Cloud. You just use it as a service. No software upgrades that you have to do that cause problems. No hardware upgrades for the servers because those servers are continually upgraded by the providers. You can budget monthly for expenditure. You know how much your server is going to cost you every month, there’s no nasty surprises when a hard drive fails. There is a reduced risk of failure because these hosting providers actually have to make sure that they don’t ever let their clients down because they would never recover from it.
Any firm that provides hosting and loses its customers data will go out of business, without a question. So everyone who does hosting treats this very seriously. Far more seriously than your IT department in your own businesses.
Ransomware, many of the new hosting platforms are Ransomware resistant so you’re less likely to be attacked. Having said that most Ransomware comes in when someone says yes to a SARS refund and that’s very difficult to stop because people want SARS refunds.
Backups are done automatically and not only are the backups done, they’re tested to make sure that the restore works in case something goes wrong. There are no IT costs. Remember I said people are becoming more and more expensive. IT people, especially those who know what they are doing are becoming really expensive and you don’t want to have to carry those costs to sort out server problems. Disaster recovery, if you have a hosted server and your practice or your offices burn down for some reason, all you do is go sit in a hotel room, you give everyone a brand new computer, they log on and start working instantly. It’s instant disaster recovery. There is no loss of server and all your data is safe and ready for you to continue working.
Seventeen percent of all firms that lose all of their data will close their doors within two years because they will just never recover. That’s because creditors, people that you owe money to will phone you up and say you haven’t paid me yet but debtors generally don’t. No one phones up and says I owe you money can I pay you? It’s true, firms do close and some big firms have closed when they have lost all their data. Of course the other benefit from hosting your server is most of your software access is via browser which makes it much easier, people know how a browser work, you don’t have to update software on all of the computers you simply use a browser to access the various software that you use.
Practical Business Advice for Lawyers – Part 1
Practical Business Advice for Lawyers – Part 2
An extract from Chris Pearson’s presentation at the Bootcamp for Small and Medium Law Firms of South Africa 2019.
Chris Pearson is the Sales and Marketing Director at XpressDox.
