The cloud top priority for legal, accounting firms

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 17 November 2011 23:06

Deploying cloud computing is the number one priority for next year for Australia's accounting and legal sectors, with one in three IT decision makers and just under half in both sectors planning to maintain or increase their budget for cloud computing over the next 12 months.

These are the key findings from a survey last month of IT decision makers from law firm and accounting practices conducted by OBT, an Australian private cloud services provider.

The OBT survey also found that they key objective for IT investment among 42 per cent of accounting and legal firms is to boost employee productivity while 32 per cent will prioritise IT investment to seek operational cost reductions in the business.  At the same time, one in four organisations will deploy IT to increase their operational agility.

When asked about their cloud transition plans within the next 12 months, one in three organisations confirmed that they will move their desktop infrastructure to the cloud in the year ahead. At the same time, 44 per cent of respondents plan to invest in mobilising applications for their workforce with 14 per cent planning to review investment in virtualisation, and 23 per cent planning to invest in security solutions.

OBT managing director, Shane Muller, said the results of the survey of 90 legal and accounting practice IT decision-makers would suggest that there will be a 'clear uptick in the demand for cloud services in the year ahead among Australian professional services firms.'

'As a result, when it comes to evaluating the physical, financial and technical capacity of a potential service provider, practice managers and managing partners would be well advised to really qualify whether moving to the cloud will benefit their bottom line. 

'This process should include evaluating cloud solutions on a total cost of ownership basis and calculating the savings you can make in terms of employee time, licensing schemes and risk mitigation. In other words, don't just compare the cost of hardware,' Muller advised.

Muller warned that professional services firms also needed to wake up to the fact that new technologies, such as virtualisation and the cloud, have changed the way data is managed and subsequently should be recovered.  'If a company's backup system fails to address these changes, when the inevitable happens and data is lost, it will be more difficult and expensive to recover.'