As most principals and practice managers know, law firms go through the expensive and distracting process of updating their office technology every few years.
Replacing the office server has traditionally been at the heart of this equipment replacement project and tended to pose the highest level of risk including data loss, downtime and cost overruns.
In recent years many firms have been looking to Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to avoid this annoying and risky hardware replacement process. VPS have been in use by professional service firms (including accountants, lawyers and medical specialists) for almost a decade and have helped businesses achieve reliability, scalability and security – as close to future proof as you can get.
What exactly is a Virtual Private Server?
A VPS is a complete Windows server (exactly the same as those we’ve had in our offices for years) but run in a secure Data Centre by a team of professionals and accessed via a secure internet connection. Typically, a VPS is provided on a fixed monthly subscription basis with no setup fees or lock-in contracts and constantly maintained and updated.
Why are law firms adopting VPS?
VPS enables law firms to control their data, while avoiding the costs and risks of dealing with hardware and backups in their own offices.
With new privacy legislation in Australia and Europe, controlling your data (including client’s personal information) has become more important than ever.
Unlike web-based software which stores all your uploaded data within a large integrated database framework (think Gmail), a Virtual Private Server ensures your data is completely separate from other data on the platform and totally under your control at all times.
VPS also avoids you being locked in by allowing you to retrieve data at any time and move it to other providers (or even back to a server in your office). This typically isn’t offered by web-based providers.
FilePro and Virtual Private Servers
To provide you with Virtual Private Servers, FilePro have partnered with Habitat3. They are a specialist in hosting sensitive data for Australian professional services firms and have developed a customised solution to ensure an efficient and painless migration from on-premise equipment to a Virtual Private Server.
In addition to the VPS features described above, you are able to set a password to access your FilePro data – this means not even Habitat3 is able to access the FilePro data you upload, making it much more secure than a web-based service provider.
The reliability and scalability of Habitat3’s VPS along with their ability to allow you to secure and control your data means the painful process of replacing and then maintaining your physical services can be a thing of the past as well as provide a more cost effective proposition.
If you’d like to learn more about a VPS for your firm, contact your FilePro manager or visit Habitat3.