Are you a Box Hugger?

Last week Invest Wirral invited Ted Shultz of Microsoft to talk about Microsoft's cloud services (included cloud-hosted Exchange and the new Office 365 service) at a breakfast seminar.

I went along and it was a real eye-opener... If you have a basement full of expensive servers already then a jump to the cloud may not make sense, but instant access to hosted Exchange, Office Online (including Sharepoint and Blackberry Enterprise Server in the cloud on a monthly subscription with no capital cost sounds pretty tempting to anyone setting up a new firm or approaching an upgrade cycle.

One thing that resonated with me was Ted's description of customers he used to come across in his pre-Microsoft days who refused to consider the possibility of anti-virus and security software in the cloud. They wanted to have the security and comfort of "seeing" their data in a basement server room. Ted explained that they (privately) referred to these customers as:-

the Box Huggers

I wondered at the time whether law firms fall into this category.

Apparently Microsoft do have law firms operating on hosted Exchange and Office in the cloud... but I wonder whether others will keen to follow suit or if lawyers will turn out to be the ultimate box huggers?