Business Services
However, enterprises working in the legal, real-estate and other service industries increasingly see new data, automation and AI technologies as double-edged, promising to deliver cost-efficiencies and reduce workloads in one stroke, while threatening established business models with the other.
Law, in particular, is on the frontlines. Back in 2017, Deloitte lead partner, Jarrod Hegarty warned of “new data-based technologies with deep legal implications that today are at the tipping point between proof of concept and real world application. Soon they will change not only the practice and the scope of the law but also the shape of the law firms themselves.”[2] With Chat GPT and other large language models now entering the mainstream, these fears are becoming more tangible. Firms are having to navigate how they adapt to the new tech landscape, or risk falling behind competitors who can.
With jobs and profits under threat, companies are under pressure to streamline while navigating often complex data protection and regulatory issues. Meanwhile, employees’ demands for working patterns need to be balanced with concerns over privacy, security and data protection.
IT leaders in the business services sector are looking to streamline, digitise and automate to make processes more efficient and enable skilled employees to focus on core business tasks. Many have disparate systems in place with little data integration, causing issues for security and data-driven tools. Yet while firms are trying to modernise, they also need to maintain their existing operations. This is something of a balancing act.
The sector is also becoming an increasingly popular target for cybercrime, both because of the sensitive client data that firms may be holding, and because few can stomach the reputational damage should a breach or ransomware attack go public. According to PwC’s 2022 Law Firms Survey[3], 78% of the Top 100 firms indicated that cyber threats were a significant concern.
Business services firms are also continuing to support remote working, driven partly by cost savings but mostly by employee demand. They’re investing in remote collaboration ecosystems and tools to monitor and manage remote workflows, but they also need endpoint devices and remote working practices that are effective, resilient and secure.
Get help to moderniseManaged services can help law firms with their modernisation priorities, by enabling them to offload management and maintenance tasks. With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management, endpoint devices can be secured and managed through the cloud, with zero-touch updates and maintenance to ensure that workers stay productive, whether in the office or at home. Meanwhile, ongoing telemetry and data analytics give IT teams the insights they need to manage their hardware fleets and plan for future requirements.
Layer up to defendEndpoint management services and managed security services can help business services firms harden their cybercrime defences and ward off incoming attacks. HP Adaptive Endpoint Management keeps devices in-line with policies and updated with the latest patches. HP Wolf Security strengthens defences through the technology stack, and helps IT manage risk. Threats can be contained, and potentially risky tasks run within an isolated micro-virtual machine. Cloud-based analytics can combine internal security data with threat intelligence from other sources, enabling firms to avoid emerging threats.
Safeguard sensitive dataEmployees handling particularly sensitive documents or data can access them through a secure remote workspace rather than their local machine. With HP Anyware, they get the same performance as on a local PC, but without the files or data leaving the corporate network or a fully-secured private or public
cloud. Only encrypted pixels are transferred outside the corporate network, ensuring that the data stays secure and the firm compliant.
1 UK Office for National Statistics, ‘Non-financial business economy, UK and regional (Annual Business Survey) 2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/business/businessservices/bulletins/nonfinancialbusinesseconomyukandregionalannualbusinesssurvey/2021results2 Deloitte, ‘Objections overruled: The case for disruptive technology in the legal professionhttps://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/financial-advisory/articles/the-case-for-disruptive-technology-in-the-legal-profession.html3 PWC, Annual Law Firms’ Survey: Agility through turbulent times’ https://www.pwc.co.uk/industries/legal-professional-business-support-services/law-firms-survey.html
Global business consultancy, Arup, had developed a complex IT environment with more than 270 different laptop and desktop computers in a worldwide fleet of over 20,000 devices. This created huge maintenance costs and no consistency in the user experience. Arup partnered with HP to rationalise its fleet and deploy HP TechPulse to deliver device, application and usage insights that could help Arup proactively fix problems and keep its systems up and running. The result has been a 30% saving on device management overhead.
