Photo by Sanwal Deen on Unsplash.
The legal profession traditionally moves very slowly when it comes to new technologies. Some might even say that attorneys have a difficult time changing. They prefer technologies tested repeatedly before adopting them. However reluctantly, the legal profession has finally agreed that the internet is here to stay and that perhaps this cloud-computing thing might be of great help in a various number of tasks.
The only industry known for more paperwork than the legal profession is the federal government, and that might be a toss-up. Hence, this need to store and quickly access this information is where software-defined storage solutions can help the legal profession. Along with the growing need to be able to store the generated paperwork the legal profession produces, the modern workplace has also created a need for distributed computing. Attorneys may need to be able to work from home when their child is sick and cannot go to school. Clients want to be able to e-sign documents. Immigration attorneys file court documents and immigration applications with the click of a button. Defendants upload lawsuit documents to the cloud and share them with their attorney. Companies working on an M&A rely on the search capability of their computers to find requested documents in a timely manner. The new millennials in the office worry about how many trees die every time they print another document. All of these changes create digital paperwork, and it has to be stored somewhere.
Racks of servers have started to replace the ubiquitous filing cabinet. The main needs in a law office for digital storage include – security, ease of use, fast, and redundant. Software-defined data storage meets all of these requirements. The ability for a law firm’s systems administrator to create a private cloud with the flexibility to use whatever hardware fits their needs, while saving costs with Nexenta is huge. In addition, it can be scaled. A small town firm might just have a few terabytes of data. And, a large busy firm, who had just digitized fifty years’ worth of files, can scale the solution to store many petabytes of data. Both firms trust that the technology they are using will not corrupt and cause them to lose information. The legal profession is finally ready for the future of easily searchable and secure software-defined data storage solutions.
-Mavis Yee, Chief Administrative Officer & General Counsel