Coming out of COVID has been a tepid resurrection – a resurgence that may well be short-lived.

Global supply chain shortages and the Russia/Ukraine war are now factoring heavily on economies.

Add to the mix the RBA’s move to adopt aggressive monetary policy and jack up cash rate prices and interest rates to deal with supply chain issues and stagflation – and its wild times ahead, especially with the wrong policy the RBA is keen to adopt.    

So, looming for business is an economic crisis, and the cloud-based technology solutions law firms use could see a heavy price paid for failing to read what’s blowing in the wind.

It won’t only impede how they function, but the degradation of their technology systems, if the right strategies aren’t made to guarantee functionality, will force rising costs of technology during a major economic downturn to be passed on.

Clients inevitably bear the brunt of those costs.

Because technology evolves at such a rapid pace, investments made in tech mean law firms have to extract the most out of their tech spending, but to what extent?

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So, what should they do to ensure they continue to deliver services their clients expect, and not pass on rising costs back to clients?

The answer experts now propose is investing in hybrid systems.

In the beginning, businesses would have procured their own hardware with large teams of staff – making it a significant capital expense.

Then data centres came along – enabling geographic redundancies and centralised systems for businesses.

And with the advent of data centres, came virtualisation and “private cloud systems” – creating massive gains and efficiencies in hardware investments.

But when public cloud arrived – it removed the need for capital expenditure to grow – enabling scaling and making technology easy to adopt, while allowing businesses to focus on their core objectives; however, there was still the issue of costs spiralling out of control.

Now, however, technology providers like ZStack and Alibaba come with an entirely new objective – to make it easy for client-intensive organisations like law firms to manage resources through solutions that provide the ease of use of the cloud with the commercial benefits of on-premises computing (data centres or head office and edge computing local office).

They believe there’s a better way to combine edge computing and still have the responsiveness of local resources to manage all platforms at optimum level.

Combining hybrid technologies with a trusted network and security services provider enables law firms to manage costs and performance of their practice’s requirements by using the right platform for the job.

The belief is a hybrid strategic approach allows law firms a seamless transition and does not impact on how they engage with clients.

It’s the management with engagement with clients of any legal practice that becomes critical – or it invariably bears a less than – prosperous long-term outcome.

Although the ease of adopting cloud solutions has resulted in organisations placing most of their applications and systems into the public cloud, costs can still quickly spiral out of control. 

Lawyers who use an intense application where data is entered by a user locally may benefit from an edge computer to perform the local processing and responsive systems.

Conversely, staff in regional offices use an HR platform infrequently better placed in the cloud.

In the end, it’s the law firms that value what a hybrid solution delivers that will weather an economic downturn better than those that don’t.

Ignazio Ranno is director of IT aolutions at Entrust ICT.