Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida (“CLSMF”) is in a state of technological transition. After moving in a strategic decision to hire me as an IT director, the goal top down was to get the organization into the cloud. The processes and solutions to make that transition are currently taking place, bolstered by our IT Vision: To provide increased access to legal services for our clients by providing our employees a mobile computing environment.
Right now, our users connect to their desktops through Remote Desktop Protocol to terminal servers hosted on a VMWare stack. Their entire computing environment lives on those servers, which makes the transition to a cloud-based solution a little easier. Employees are comfortable with the idea that their emails, files, and software are located somewhere other than their local computer, so CLSMF will replicate that experience in a more traditional SaaS model.
The decision to move everything towards the cloud is driven by three main components: 1) work location independence; 2) technological uniformity; and 3) cost savings.
- Work Location Independence
Currently, our employees can work from any device that can access our terminal servers. Working from home is limited to the devices the employees currently own, as our laptop fleet needs a refresh. This creates the opportunity to comingle personal and professional data, along with the unwritten rule that an employee will have a PC available in their house for just work purposes. In CLSMF’s IT vision, all employees will have mobile computers which are controlled through mobile device management. Therefore, all employees will have the ability to work where they want and when they want. This will eliminate comingling of personal data and/or dedicating a computer in a home solely to work purposes. The future at CLSMF includes moving to a hosted voice solution where this device is also your phone for a truly mobile experience.
- Technological Uniformity
CLSMF is a two-person IT shop, and our goal is to provide proactive IT services to allow our employees to serve more clients. We do not want to be in the business of repairing or supporting hardware. Having technological uniformity will help us get to that ideal, meaning that every employee at CLSMF will have the same mobile computing device. Every office will have one spare device in the case of damage or malware, and each device will have a 3-year warranty service to take the task or repairs off of the IT staff.
- Cost Savings
A transition to the cloud will allow CLSMF moves capex to opex, including an eventual elimination of our entire data center and licensing tied to it. This will help grant writers provide grantors a real cost of employment that includes the yearly IT costs for each additional employee. Another cost savings in actual dollars is realized by decreasing managed service contracts tied to PC support and labor cost by minimizing the need for CLSMF IT staff to handle PC repair issues. Moving our infrastructure to the cloud allows CLSMF to plan for the future and removes barriers to hidden costs.
Based on the current project plan, CLSMF will run on these platforms:
- Mobile devices for all employees
- Office 365
- Office 2016 with OneDrive for Business Sync
- SaaS case management through LegalServer
- Windows InTune for MDM
- Software applications hosted in the cloud to be determined, with OS33 being a possibility
In our move to the cloud, CLSMF must take two in compliant with 1) the State of Florida and 2) our grantors. CLSMF also uses that information as a step in our risk mitigation process with client data.
- The Florida Bar
Per the Professional Ethics of The Florida Bar Opinion 12-3, “Lawyers may use cloud computing if they take reasonable precautions to ensure confidentiality of client information is maintained, that the service provider maintains adequate security, and that the lawyer has adequate access to the information stored remotely.” CLSMF is leveraging the built-in security, privacy, and continuous compliance standards of Microsoft to adhere to that standard. As for case management, almost every Florida non-profit law firm that provides legal services uses LegalServer, so the risk of compliance and security of that product is tied together with almost every provider in our state.
- Grantor Considerations
CLSMF uses the baseline for legal services from Legal Services Corporation as a basis of our grantor cloud compliance, which states: “Programs moving applications or data to the cloud should consider terms of use, privacy policy, data ownership, security, and data portability.” CLSMF has considered this, and is putting our trust into Microsoft and LegalServer to adhere to those standards. The future location of CLSMF’s IT applications will also take into account the opinions of The Florida Bar and Legal Services Corporation to make sure we are in compliance of their regulations.
The mission of CLSMF is to provide legal assistance and advocacy to help the people of Central Florida obtain the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, health care, safety and education. The IT department at CLSMF is working towards that mission by moving our IT infrastructure into cloud computing. Leveraging cloud resources to maximize our labor and budget will allow our department to become proactive, and enable to the concerns and needs of our employees that work hard to fulfill that mission.