3 Important Cloud Performance Indicators
The cloud brings a number of benefits for law firms, but how do you know that your setup is being used to its fullest? Moving to the cloud can take considerable time and resources to execute, and it’s essential to ensure that your investment was well-spent. Monitoring cloud usage and behaviors will help make critical decisions for improving workflows and maximizing the technology’s capabilities. There are three key performance indicators that legal practices should watch to measure cloud value:
1. Costs Before vs. After Integration
One of the cloud’s main selling points is the fact that it promises to cut down operating expenses. On-premises management can be pricey for a law firm, as it must find individuals skilled enough to support the technology, not to mention the hardware and software to set up the infrastructure. Moving these functions to a capable cloud provider takes a considerable amount of pressure off of the legal practice.
Your vendor should make all the necessary investments in maintenance and updates for within their cloud, whether it’s just a data center or a true cloud network. CIO contributor David Spark noted that cost differences associated with reduced resources and consolidated data center functions will significantly decrease operating expenses upon migrating to the cloud. Law firms should monitor bills before and after integration to determine cloud value and how much it’s saving them.
2. Improved User Experience
Cloud solutions should be directly beneficial for workers who are using the platform. Law firm staff members are increasingly seeking to use mobile devices and work in locations outside of the office. This means providing access to business resources when meeting clients, in court and other areas. According to Sparity, mobile users are five times more likely to abandon tasks if the resource isn’t optimized for their device. In addition, 83 percent of respondents note that a seamless experience across devices is important to them.
With support from the cloud, firms can easily provision features and support resources digitally. Lawyers no longer have to walk around with arms full of case files, but can simply access these documents safely and securely through their cloud portal. This not only saves on paper usage, but also provides employees with the flexibility that they demand with mobile devices. Legal practices should track user experience through productivity metrics and behaviors. If a staff member shows higher throughput after migration, the cloud could be a direct driver of this change.
“Legal practices can capture new leads, share outcomes and define next steps”
3. Speed For Response And Development
Faster time to market and quicker issue response times are major benefits that law firms can measure upon transitioning to the cloud. When an issue comes up, it can take a long time to research and fix it manually, particularly when physical files or servers are involved. With the cloud, legal practices can instantly capture new leads, share outcomes and define next steps, Spark stated. These firms should also establish a KPI for the average time between a bug report and solution deployment. The cloud can provide a 30 to 80 percent increase in IT responsiveness for these instances.
Law firms will also want to take into account how long it takes to develop and provision applications on their networks. This KPI will evaluate not only that the practice is establishing something that enriches customer experience, but also is being done quickly enough to benefit the bottom line.
Cloud computing is an investment, and it’s important for law firms to ensure that they are making the most of it. By monitoring KPIs associated with provisioning speed, user experience and costs, legal practices can gauge the value of their cloud setup. Contact Afinety today to learn more about how the cloud can work for your law firm and how to track its value.