By Greg Sellek, Director of Infrastructure
Every IT person has an I remember when… story, whether it’s floppy drives, CRT monitors, or in my case, a server that cost more than my annual salary but had less storage than today’s entry-level iPhone. The same can be said of traditional on-premise infrastructure. I remember when we had to buy the hardware (servers, network, storage, firewalls, the list goes on and on…) and then configure it, install operating systems, then applications, and then customize it to each client. The process didn’t just take days or weeks, it was often months!
Cue the Cloud, where someone else has already done all that leg work for you. Add in some sophisticated automation and you can spin up a whole new environment with a few mouse clicks. What used to take months, now takes hours.
Why Cloud-First Operations Deliver Faster, Smarter, More Reliable Client Experiences
Running a 100% cloud-based infrastructure allows us to onboard our clients quickly and provide responsive and resilient applications faster than ever before. We’re also able to take advantage of built-in datacenter redundancy to provide increased availability with very little overhead.
Additionally, when a client is having a particularly successful year and is bringing more and more traffic to our systems, we are able to scale very quickly. In the old days you had to predict this months in advance, as it took that long to order the additional hardware and stand it up. But again, with the cloud, with a few mouse clicks we have as much additional capacity as we need!
Cloud-first operations make it easy to grow without the worry. With the redundancy and availability already built into the cloud, we know our applications will stay online, even when traffic spikes or something unexpected happens. And when clients bring more volume our way, we don’t have to scramble or wait on new hardware; the system simply scales up with a few clicks. Instead of dealing with the limitations of old, on-prem setups, we can rely on an infrastructure that adjusts itself as needed. It’s a level of reliability and flexibility that wasn’t possible before, and it goes a long way in building trust with our clients.
Building Consistency, Security, and Trust Through Automated Cloud Deployment
Using methodologies like Infrastructure as Code (IaC), along with deployment pipelines, we can easily spin up new clients and environments in a repeatable, automated fashion. This ensures that each and every client is created with our baseline configuration and security controls. Not only is it about speed to market but also consistency.
With IaC and deployment pipelines, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we bring on a new client. Every environment is spun up the same way, with the same configurations and security controls baked in from the start. It takes the guesswork out of onboarding and removes the manual steps that used to slow us down or introduce mistakes. By automating this process, we’re able to move faster without sacrificing consistency or security. It’s a reliable, repeatable approach that scales with us and gives clients confidence that their environment is set up right every single time.
Moving to the cloud has become a real necessity for modern dispute operations. The volume, the speed, the security requirements… they’re all too much for the old ways of doing things. The cloud gives you the flexibility and reliability to keep up without the headaches of managing hardware or guessing at future capacity. And having a trusted tech partner by your side makes all the difference. When you work with a team that knows this space and has already solved these challenges, you get a smoother path forward and a system you can count on. It’s the simplest way to stay ahead and keep your dispute operations running the way they should.
