This Tuesday, we spoke to the Small Firm Management section of the ALA Capital Chapter on IT trends for small firms. What we encounter is that small firms have many of the same IT challenges of large law firms, just not on the same scale.

Both small and large firms alike are paying close attention to these IT trends:

Getting more for your money – Everyone is looking to stretch their IT dollars, so small firms are looking to managed IT services and large firms look to outsource basic tasks like daily server checks and monitoring. Firms are also looking at application services providers (Internet providers) for critical systems like time & billing, backup, e-mail and spam filtering.

Virtualization of desktops and servers – flexibility and ability to recover from disasters quickly makes this one of the hottest trends to watch.

Data vaulting – whether the firm administrator is tired of bringing back-up tapes home every night or an integral part of a disaster recovery plan, data vaulting—online backups—are the way to go.

Mobility – Including remote access, laptop and handheld computing, staying in the office is so last century.

Security – While constant struggle against malware rages on, now everyone should also pay attention to stopping data breaches that can cost your firm both money and its reputation.

What are the IT trends where small firms are sitting on the sidelines? WANs; desktop management and software deployment; and Storage Area Networks (SANs).