Reallocating resources: Moving to the cloud to refocus IT efforts

Key takeaway points:

1. Look to refocus your in-house skills on other projects –leave the operations to your service provider.

2. Not all cloud providers are equal – look at the services they provide, not the technology.

3. Be prepared – things will go wrong in transition.

4. If you do it right, the cloud will save you money.

5. Talk to your clients and prepare them for change – don’t underestimate the importance of this.

 

Following a period of rapid growth across all areas of our business, including the opening of new offices ?in Singapore and London, Taylor Vinters ?had reached the point where our existing ?IT infrastructure could no longer scale ?to support our rapidly-evolving ?business needs.

With business operations expanding physically and becoming increasingly complex, we required a solution that would equip and align IT to support this change. We needed an answer from an IT perspective that could cope with the changes in the business and provide the answer to increasing client demands for resiliency.

We went out to the market with a view to buying greater capacity when it came to our IT, primarily in the form of servers. Initially, we were looking for new storage infrastructure but then realised that traditional IT simply wasn’t going to work. What we ended up with was a managed service solution. The major difference was between a capital offering and an operational service offering.

Our key requirement was having a solution that was truly flexible and scalable. We needed reliability and capacity, as well as the ability to flex where that capacity was in terms of interfacing with lawyers and clients. We were struggling to an extent with the resources to deliver and maintain what the business required but, as with every firm, cash was also a large consideration.

We knew the business was growing ?and would become more complex, but we didn’t really know how it would expand, nor how quickly. We needed a cost-effective ?IT service that would help us support ?this unpredictable growth.
We ended up adopting a managed ?cloud service for our key application ?IT infrastructure.

We decided to work with Proact because it tried to gain a true understanding of the IT implications of our business objectives and then provided a solution that mapped out at a high level what we were trying to achieve as a business. It was the only provider that elicited from us what our underlying problem was and suggested a cloud-based solution.

Moving to the cloud

The decision to move to a cloud platform wasn’t easy; it was a huge undertaking to shift from where we were to a managed solution in the context of a regulated industry. However, it made sense. It provided the reliability and resources that we needed on an operational cost model.

However, we did need to assess our current systems to determine whether to move all or just some of our software to the cloud, as well as to decide upon the appropriate cloud computing platform prior ?to implementation.

It was a phased approach – the transition took time. While we had the confidence in what we were doing, much of it was new. ?We did not hand everything over on day one, but rather slowly furthered our confidence in the provider and its cloud-based services.
This enabled us to be completely at peace with the vast changes within our infrastructure and helped everyone to see ?the real benefits that we were gaining, getting the buy-in of all as we progressed with the move to the cloud.

Once the first server storage implementation had gone well and we could see that we were getting the service levels agreed, we gradually moved over more of our IT systems to the cloud.

Some of the issues we encountered were around the availability of skills and resources within the business. One of ?the biggest challenges was the sheer effort and scale necessary to transition ?the service.

We also needed to consider issues such as privacy and security. Our IT team worked with the supplier to identify the knowledge necessary to deliver the service. They negotiated downtime and helped us to understand the impact this would have on all users. They also ensured there was a suitable backup plan in place to mitigate the risks.

The cultural shift

The key lesson learned here was not technical. As moving to the cloud is essentially an IT project, it is too easy to think of it solely in a technical or ‘hard’ manner. In reality, we probably underestimated the implications of it from the ‘softer’ side – the cultural shift that needed to occur internally.

In retrospect, we simply didn’t understand the magnitude of what we were doing when it came to this non-technical side of the change and the reassurance that was needed for ?those who would be impacted on a day-to-day level.

Gaining stakeholder buy-in is key. We communicated that people were still an absolute necessity: it wasn’t about losing resources internally or outsourcing, but about gaining more value from what we were doing. It was about shifting ?our focus from must-do tasks to value-added projects.

The technical part was relatively easy, though this was perhaps underestimated too – the nuances that come with every IT environment, especially in terms of a legal and client set up.
But, this was nothing compared to the human element. If we had managed that better, the results we saw would have come around even more quickly.

The impact of the cloud

Our business is about data and integrity. Increasingly, competitive advantage in the legal services industry is about the ability to be able to deliver on client expectations quickly and without interruption on ?a global basis.

The transition to cloud-based IT services has been a huge enabler of our business plans. Within a year of the solution being in place, we saw results ?that would have taken several years to achieve had we been using our own resource base. The performance and resilience of our systems have been enhanced, while our need for greater flexibility has been met.

The new system mitigates risks, ensures uptime and enhances service delivery for both internal and external users. We can now easily deliver on client expectations quickly and without interruption on a global basis, and the system can grow with our business.

At the outset of the project, we baselined the current cost of ownership, including the cost of current assets, operational costs and resources. We projected costs over the next five years if we continued with business as usual, including all projected future spend. We then applied the provider’s monthly charge in order to project where the return on investment would be achieved, and measured this at regular intervals.

What we have through the managed service model is consistent, predictable IT expenditure on a monthly basis. The flexible cost model ensures that we only pay for what we use. Our IT spend has shifted from an inflexible capex model to a highly flexible and predictable opex model. In addition to this, we also have a contractual service-level agreement that is designed specifically to match our business model.

As a result of moving to the cloud, our IT team has been freed up to work on higher-value strategic projects within the business, such as putting in new service delivery systems for our clients and helping to improve processes and efficiency within the business, rather than wasting their time on laborious IT maintenance tasks.

The bottom line is that we have saved money through moving to the cloud and we now benefit from shared resources and economies of scale.

Ed Turner is the managing partner at Taylor Vinters (ed.turner@taylorvinters.com)