The Cloud. Broadly defined as a set of shared Services available on the Internet.

"The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the IT industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate."

The Economist, "Let it Rise," 10/23/08

Gone are the days of firms making use of capital budgets. The modern IT trend is for companies to shift from Capital to Operating Budgets, setting a specified price per head for service delivery only, not factoring in any capital costs, but making use of cloud services to rent services from external data sources which are much more reliable, against a fraction of the cost. Companies make use of modern IT trends for two convergence factors:

• IT Efficiency to minimize Cost - Companies are converting their IT costs from Capital expenses to operating expenses.

• Business Agility - Critical way to revolutionize time as a service.

IT Efficiency on a Whole New Scale

Cloud computing is all about efficiency. It provides a way to deploy and access everything from single systems to huge amounts of IT resources - on demand, in real time, at an affordable cost. It makes high-performance compute and high-capacity storage available to anyone with a credit card. And since the best cloud strategies build on concepts and tools that developers already know, clouds also have the potential to redefine the relationship between information technology and the developers and business units that depend on it.

Law firms can utilise cloud computing to benefit from the following:-

• Reducing capital expenditures Cloud computing makes it possible for companies to convert IT costs from capital expense to operating expense through technologies such as virtualisation. (At its simplest level, virtualization allows you, virtually and cost-effectively, to have two or more computers, running two or more completely different environments, on one piece of hardware. For example, with virtualization, you can have both a Linux machine and a Windows machine on one system)

• Cut the cost of running a datacenter Cloud computing improves infrastructure utilization rates and streamlines resource management. For example, clouds allow for self-service provisioning through APIs, bringing a higher level of automation to the datacenter and reducing management costs.

Eliminate over provisioning 

Cloud computing provides scaling on demand which, when combined with utility pricing, removes the need to overprovision to meet demand. With cloud computing, companies can scale up to massive capacities in an instant. For those who think cloud computing is just fluff, take a closer look at the cloud offerings that are already available. Major Internet providers Amazon.com, Google, and others are leveraging their infrastructure investments and "sharing" their large-scale economics. Already the bandwidth used by Amazon Web Services (AWS) exceeds that associated with their core e-tailing services. Forward-looking enterprises of all types - from Web 2.0 startups to global enterprises - are embracing cloud computing to reduce infrastructure costs.

Interesting Fact: 

The New York Times needed to convert 11 million articles and images in its archive (from 1851 to 1980) to PDF. Their Internal IT said it would take them seven weeks. In the meantime, one developer using 100 Amazon EC2 simple Web service interface instances running Hadoop (an open-source implementation similar to MapReduce) completed the job in 24 hours for less than $300. -open.blogs.nytimes.com, "Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!" 11/1/07, open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing- fun.