Slash Your Technology Budget and
Technology Headaches

~by Troy Henley, Columbus Bar Association

Hosted computing services, cloud computing: These terms refer to a newer computing model where the end-user simply subscribes to a service and accesses it over the internet rather than buying and maintaining their own internal server hardware and software.

For example, instead of maintaining your own office email system, you pay a small monthly fee to a company that will maintain, support, upgrade, troubleshoot and backup an off-site, business-grade email system which you access over the internet. Further, most hosted service companies have their equipment parked in Tier II to Tier IV data centers. That built-in redundancy is something that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for an office to duplicate. Hosted services provide you with a level of redundancy and failover that is economically out of reach of most law practices. (See Tech Notes at the bottom of this article for what comprises the different Tier Levels).

Farming out parts of your network will allow you to focus more time on your core business of practicing law and not having to spend time maintaining computer network services such as : email servers, network faxing integration, spam filtering software, Smartphone synchronization servers. If you have a technology proficient staff member who assists with your office’s technology issues, this will also relieve them from the support burden and allow them focus on your law practice. In addition to eliminating one of your staff members many “hats”, you are replacing them with a team of dedicated IT professionals that run and maintain the hosted systems. A large trade-up!

Hosted email services are not the same type of system you have grown accustomed to for your home email account. This is a fully functional email server (Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, Linux based systems). So it gives you the full experience you have grown accustomed to with your current office system. These hosted email solutions support email distribution groups, calendars, contacts and tasks. Many hosting services also give you lots of free add-ons such as free Postini spam filtering, free Outlook software and free Outlook and server upgrades as new versions of both server and client software are released. Hosting services can also provide the Enterprise-grade synchronization software needed for pushing data out to Blackberry, iPhone and Treo smart phones. Event Microsoft is getting into the hosted services business.

These hosted solutions can offer a full feature list comparable to what you would have with your own, in-house email server….with five major advantages:

1) Slash your Total Cost of Ownership: No hardware or software to purchase, no upgrades to buy. No support plans to purchase, no consultants to pay.

2) Time Savings: Elimination of upport\troubleshooting\upgrade overhead.

3) The Highest Level of Disaster Recovery and Backup.

4) Predictable Costs: The costs are known and predictable.

5) Highly Scalable: As your law practice grows, hosted services will accommodate the growth of your expanding office with little difficulty. Most hosted services are highly scalable.

If your case management docketing integrates with Outlook calendars than this hosted email service may not be an option for your. Depending on the case management system you are using, it may need access to an email server on the local network. More and more case management systems are offering integration with hosted email services. This varies from program to program and vendor to vendor.

Another popular office technology to farm out to a hosting company is network faxing. Network faxing services integrate directly with your office email account, allowing you to send and receive faxes directly from your email client (Outlook, Groupwise…etc.). Not only is the hosted solution much cheaper than investing in network faxing software, server hardware, modem board and a DID phone line, but also provides seamless integration with your email program. Network faxing is a paperless office solution that will help cut your paper\toner expenses while providing a much higher level of functionality and meeting your green initiatives.

Incoming faxes appear as an email, the fax is typically a PDF file attachment. So you have instant notification of your incoming faxes and they are already digitized for easy archival and retrieval or routing to another office member. Network faxing also gives you the ability to read your faxes on any PDF supported Smartphone such as the Blackberry or Treo. Additionally, you can drag and drop faxes into your case management system for organizational purposes.

Some Hosted Service Providers:

ExchangeMyMail.com – hosted email solutions, low monthly rates, no contracts.

Easylink.com - hosted network faxing solution. No software\hardware to buy or install. They can integrate your existing fax number or provide you with new fax numbers. You only need to provide them with a list of user names, their associated email addresses and their fax numbers, this company does the rest!

Rackspace.com – hosted email solutions.

TECH NOTE:
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) are two organizations that formulate standards for the industry to follow. The TIA developed a specification entitled TIA-942: Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers. This is perhaps the most widely referenced standard when talking about data center facility availability. From the title you might think this specification is for telecom data centers. It is, but it’s much broader in scope. TIA covers cabling, space layout, site selection criteria, and infrastructure tiers/availability.

The Industry Standard “Tier III Data Center” – No annual shutdowns for maintenance are required. Composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths. One active data path. Has redundant components, and is concurrently maintainable, providing 99.982% availability.