Cloud still too dark for legal information

Law In Order director, Paul Gooderick

Moving proprietary legal information to public cloud services is too risky for one services firm, which believes many unanswered questions about how the data is managed remain.

Director of Sydney-based document solutions company Law In Order, Paul Gooderick, says it would not be a “smart decision” at this time to move to a public cloud.

“There are issues around where the documents are, how they can be controlled and how many instances of the documents there are,” Gooderick said.

Law In Order manages its own data centre operations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Gooderick says there are also jurisdictional issues around public cloud services.

“Lawyers may be able to access sensitive case information in the cloud by going through the jurisdiction it is hosted in,” he said.

“Big legal cases have so many documents and we are an evidence processing organisation.”

The company bought its first servers from Dell and now has 40, of which about half are virtualised in a private cloud.

Gooderick says staff are still doing a lot of manual processing for its cloud infrastructure.

“We are running it all on Hyper-V which was a risk a few years ago, but it has worked out well,” he said.

“However, we pay for a Dell machine and the Microsoft licenses are three times the cost.”

To help with its asset management requirements, Law In Order is using Dell’s Kace software which helps process its evidence information “with one click”.

“We use Kace for asset management as our software licensing was getting out of control,” Gooderick said.

“The other use is deployment. Our servers are re-imaged every day and even with something like an upgrade to .Net 4.0 we had to bring everything to a baseline and re-image it.”

With Kace, Gooderick wants to automate future software updates.

Rodney Gedda is Deputy Editor of CIO Australia. Follow Rodney on Twitter at @rodneygedda. Rodney's e-mail address is rodney_gedda@idg.com.au. Follow CIO Australia on Twitter at @CIO_Australia.

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