Cloud vs. On-Prem Tools for Legal Teams

So, you're in the market for some software, eh? Well, before you go making any decisions, let's talk about the age-old question: on-premise or cloud-based? Trust us; you'll want to go with the cloud-based option. Here's why: 

No extra costs
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a very popular delivery and business model for web software. The premise of SaaS is to have access to any browser without any extra software to install locally. In contrast to on-premise software, which has hidden costs in addition to the purchase of the license. Those hidden costs include the purchase of additional hardware to run the software, a dedicated server administrator for maintenance and troubleshooting, and additional upgrades of the software as released by the vendor.

High availability
Cloud-based software vendors guarantee the availability of the software through their Service Level Agreement. It’s usually a number around 99%. That simply means that throughout the entire year, which is 525,600 minutes, the application will only go down for a total of 87.6 hours, and it’s usually for scheduled maintenance performed off-hours. On-premise software would require your internal IT team to provide and maintain that level of availability for the software to be accessible.

Upgrades are rolled in
One of the best parts of using a SaaS product is that it is constantly being upgraded. On a typical day, a SaaS provider can do hundreds of upgrades to the product, most of which are transparent to you. Those hundreds of upgrades span the range of bug fixes, new features, and security patches. Your annual contract with a SaaS company has all these fixes and upgrades rolled into the cost so your team gets the highest value. On-premise software must be upgraded manually, usually sold at an extra cost.

Ever since 2016, cloud-based software has been the way to go for legal teams and the businesses they power. It's a corporate model that provides the biggest benefit to the customer and the lowest overall cost.

To learn more about LinkSquares legal technology, check out our cloud-based, award-winning contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution today.