"A shrinking legal market and fierce price competition has placed law firms under immense pressure to be as productive as possible. For their IT departments, this means a focus on freeing up fee earners so they can spend as much time as possible doing what they are best at – making money."

We are pleased to welcome guest author Rob Greenslade, Sales & Marketing Director of Centralis, as he looks at the competitive pressures driving law firms towards virtualisation and the technology options available:-

It’s no great secret that the legal sector has been cautious when adopting new technology. Historically 2-3 years behind more commercially-aggressive organisations, pressures from the economic downturn, increased competition and client sophistication are forcing law firms to operate within tighter spending and management controls in order to maintain profits as fee revenue has dropped.

There is no question that the high availability of information systems, applications and data are critical to a law firm’s ability to generate fees. When lawyers can’t access their applications or get to their case data, valuable time and resources are wasted. It also leads to frustrated staff, clients and partners. As a result firms of all sizes are looking more seriously at embracing the latest technologies to drive efficiency and increase profits.

One technology in particular is now attracting a lot of attention from the legal sector.  Known as ‘virtual desktop infrastructure’ (VDI), VDI allows businesses to host desktops from a centralised server room,  data centre, or indeed from the cloud. It separates the individual user’s settings from their device and operating system to enable significant benefits including enhanced performance and reduced cost and complexity of managing the desktop application environment. It also improves the end-user experience – especially when users are accessing corporate applications in a number of ways, such as by laptop, desktop or other end-device running a thin client.

Time is money

One major benefit of VDI is rapid deployment. A growing problem, particularly for firms using outdated technology, is the time that fee earners can waste logging-on to corporate systems and applications. It is not unusual for users to take up to five minutes accessing the corporate network with their user profile and this can easily take double when logging-on remotely. Indeed, at one law firm, it took users 40 minutes to log-on to the network remotely. Although 5-10 minutes out of someone’s day might not sound like much, when you multiply this across 500 fee earners, 100 of whom might be working remotely, over the course of one month this soon adds up to an alarming amount.

Desktop virtualisation eliminates this issue by ensuring instant access to the systems and applications on the corporate network and allowing a user’s profile to be accessed securely from any device regardless of location. Because all data is stored centrally, it also ensures that sensitive client data is not stored locally on laptops or other mobile devices, giving the law firm much greater control and confidence that it is in compliance with regulatory mandates around security and privacy of data.

Another key advantage of VDI is the flexibility it provides. Law firms today must accommodate more flexible working patterns while also reducing cost. With VDI, savings can be made by enabling hot-desking to reduce premises costs and by making staff more efficient by delivering them applications and data both reliably and securely at their point of use.  By providing a consistent and secure desktop environment either at home, in the office or while travelling, VDI ensures any law firm can  enable its employees to work productively wherever they are in the world and quickly support clients whatever and whenever they need it.

In a VDI deployment, the applications run locally, so there is no performance degradation regardless of the distance between where the user is located and the firm’s central server. The biggest payback using virtual desktops, however, is in areas of administrative and maintenance costs and the elimination of application conflict, as it enables law firms to manage their applications centrally.

Typically, lawyers will work with multiple versions of applications to match the versions used by various clients. This often leads to system conflicts that can ultimately crash PCs. In addition, the firm will run numerous internal applications that must be updated periodically. These updates require expensive, labour-intensive refreshes of every PC and, in larger firms, these can take months to complete.

VDI technology can save anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of IT help desk costs because IT administrators no longer have to manage, patch, upgrade and support employees’ PCs in a client/server environment. Employees can access centralised applications from their PCs without having to install software agents and are able to run multiple versions of an application on a PC without creating conflicts, which further reduces the administrative burden. It also allows for reduced pre-deployment testing and greatly simplifies operating system migrations.

Furthermore, if IT systems go offline during business hours, costs can easily spiral into the thousands of pounds per hour. Virtualised machines make it very fast to recover from failures. Finally, with law firms increasingly turning their attention to the cost and environmental impact of power consumption, cooling, disposal and technology refresh; any move towards a thinner client has significant appeal – particularly as the local multimedia capability of devices increases.

Assessing VDI options

In the current economic climate, the last thing the CIO wants to do is roll out a technology that becomes redundant. VDI represents a fairly safe investment as it enables companies to create a journey with a number of stages rather than a single destination. So the future might be desktops on demand with streamed subscription applications and centralised data, all re-charged on a usage model, but the reality for most law firms is a desktop and application transformation that lifts the computing environment away from the device.

Although there are clear and measurable benefits of adopting a VDI strategy across the organisation, effective automation and systems management are required to ensure that every virtual machine is built to a known standard and that the standard can be updated in one place with changes distributed automatically. Only with a good understanding of the available technologies, together with existing investments and strategies, can a legal practice choose the right solution with any degree of confidence. Finding the perfect solution is not straightforward, although the simple rule of ‘you get what you pay for’ tends to apply.  So what are the options?

Citrix offers an integrated suite that allows for a mix of delivery models under a single XenDesktop license and a range of networking products optimised for security, performance and WAN (wide area network) delivery. Meanwhile, having pretty much created the commercial virtualisation market, VMware continues to be the vendor of choice for most enterprise-scale server virtualisation projects and has a track record in high-availability, site recovery and fault tolerance. The VMware View desktop virtualisation platform has seen relatively slow adoption but its strength is in delivering a cost effective solution that also nurtures innovation and development via the company’s PCoIP protocol.

Of course, it is difficult to reckon without Microsoft in any corner of the infrastructure market. Although it has allied itself strongly with Citrix with regard to the desktop, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is being adopted in many firms. In addition, its System Center is seeing rapid uptake in medium-to-large organisations as the most effective cross-platform management tool. Microsoft is fully behind the Citrix XenDesktop offering, which is another compelling factor in its favour.

An alternative approach is centralised virtual desktop management technology from Virtual Computer (NxTop), a finalist in the VMWorld desktop virtualization category for the last few years, offering the capability to reduce PC operating costs while improving mobility & user experience, to provision and update PCs from a central console with no end-user disruption and to migrate PCs to Windows 7 with a few clicks of the mouse.

A range of application virtualisation options are also available. These include App-V from Microsoft, ThinApp from VMware and Desktop Application Streaming technology from Citrix. Virtualising applications allows them to be streamed into the virtual machines as they are provisioned, reducing both the number of builds needed and resource overheads. It can also eliminate application conflicts and allow multiple versions of an application (e.g. Office 2003 & 2007) to be delivered to the same device.

A law firm looking to become more agile needs a robust, scalable personalisation solution – particularly if they are planning a move to Windows 7. AppSense  ensures that the process of migration and co-existence becomes much less painful and it is much easier to bring users along for the ride if the journey starts with virtualising them and their settings.

Thin clients from WYSE and IGEL, which are optimised for desktop virtualisation, are attractive for any firm looking for low-energy solutions to reduce their carbon emissions. This remote management software consumes the power equivalent to that of a Christmas tree light bulb and, with no moving parts, is silent and very durable.

Not surprisingly, storage is one of the most urgent considerations. The business case for many of the early VDI projects fell foul when the storage costs of scaling the solution from pilot to production became known, as desktop virtualisation of any size requires a different profile of storage. Simply transferring disk images from cheap SATA devices in PCs to expensive SAN fabric is not an option for most law firms.

There are a range of answers to the question of how to get storage costs under control. Thin provisioning, cloning, de-duplication, PAM cards, caching and a range of products and upgrades can all be applied at a cost.  But asking your storage vendor which one is right for you is a bit like opening your wallet and closing your eyes at the same time! It is therefore essential to get comprehensive advice on the range of choices, implications and costs.

Changing the status quo

Aside from its many benefits, desktop virtualisation does introduce some added variables and complexity into the IT equation, so it is important to recognise the potential hazards. Firstly, without a clear end goal and strategic vision, the journey is difficult to plan and success is hard to quantify. Increased pressure and scarce resources mean that planning and preparation must be perfect, or else performance and productivity will suffer. Here, a small budget put aside for analysis can prevent costly mistakes.

Of course, there can be a temptation to go fast and cheap, but for many law firms virtualisation will touch every part of their working experience and skimping on product, strategy, analysis or design is likely to deliver some very unhappy users.

All this considered, when VDI is approached in the right way, it provides features and tools that change the status quo. Its ability to significantly reduce costs and increase flexibility are undeniable and it can go a long way in helping forward-thinking law firms to deliver the highest quality client service and realise a competitive edge.

Centralis is a leading independent IT consultancy, specialising in delivering applications securely to their point of use. Centralis’ mission is to help customers reduce cost and improve business agility through innovative, award-winning solutions backed by top-level partnership with industry leading vendors including Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. www.centralis.co.uk