Law Students

Law Practice on the Cloud and Amazon's S3?

We host our entire law practice on the cloud: matter management, document management, email & calendaring, accounting, phones & fax (VOIP), etc. Well, not exactly everything, we still create and store client documents temporarily on local devices, as well as other administrative information.

Complete and final drafts are always stored on the cloud where they are readily "searchable" and accessible, anywhere, anytime. The reality is that we are mostly on the cloud from an operational perspective but we do not believe that our use of local storage will go away anytime soon. What does all of this have to do with S3?

I will get to that in a minute. First what is S3? It is Amazon's Simple Storage System. It allows any organization to store "objects" (i.e. data) on the cloud using the same technology Amazon uses to store data for millions of customers. Amazon charges 0.15 cents per GB/month and even less depending on your volume. In short, it is an extremely cost effective way of doing electronic off site storage.

We just implemented S3 to synchronize our critical law office data to the cloud in real time. Upon first use all data identified as critical (e.g. a set of file folders on your local storage system) is copied to the cloud. After that, only documents that are new/modified get copied/synchronized. So far so good. We are quite happy with the service.

Here's the drawback (assuming that you can overcome the security red herring), it takes a different third party utility to talk to S3. S3 is literally a service to be used by other product developers to leverage and not a complete solution in and of itself. We purchased a relatively inexpensive synchronization program from SuperFlexible and it was relatively straightforward to implement.

That said, relatively straightforward does not mean easy because we first needed to decide on a front end vendor (somewhat time consuming) and then we had to implement. Total time to decide and implement was approximately 4 hours, but we are "geekier" than most firms. Amazon and other vendors need to make it more straightforward to move backups to the cloud if they hope to get anything but end user/geeks adopting their service.

BTW, this service scales and is not only for small businesses. Eli Lilly is currently using S3 in a significant way. Amazon expects that many more large companies will soon follow suit, in addition to the early adopters such as Lilly (and others). This is world class technology that all companies can leverage, but the little guys are going to need some help. Still, we now sleep better knowing that we have an instant backup available should disaster strike, either on our local system or on the cloud.

Full post as published by LawTechTV on January 11, 2009 (boomark / email).