As the chief information officer at a major law firm, Jason Thomas (pictured) is besieged by vendors and constantly under pressure to plan for future needs while making bets on technology that will handle demand and remain secure. It’s a balancing act to say the least, which is why Thomas devotes the time necessary to making sure that he doesn’t find himself in the boss’s office having to explain why a major information-technology purchase failed to make the case.

“CEOs don’t want to hear: ‘Yeah, we just bought this thing last year, but we’ll have to buy something new now because it doesn’t work,’” Thomas said. “It’s embarrassing. Let’s do it right the first time.”

Thomas spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in two separate interviews at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed the firm’s technology approach and preferred solutions, how Thomas deals with multiple vendors and products, enterprise security, and the importance of the long-term plan (transcripts of the two interviews can be viewed here and here).

Premium on efficiency

Thomas’ firm, Cole Scott & Kissane P.A., has 12 offices located throughout the state of Florida. With a highly active caseload and approximately 475 attorneys, there’s a premium on productivity and efficiency, driven by the need to store, access and protect a massive amount of client information.

“We open dozens of new cases per day,” Thomas said. “We want to use the best technology possible to make us as efficient as possible. That’s the chief driver for tech at the law firm.”

Watch the first of the two interviews with Thomas below:

To meet IT needs for the firm, Thomas relies on a combined solution that leverages Rubrik, a cloud data management company, and Clumio, a software as a service solution for enterprise backup. CSK is a VMware shop and uses Clumio to replicate its servers to the Amazon Web Services Inc. Cloud.

“With Rubrik and Clumio, once you pop that appliance into your environment, whether hardware or virtual, it integrates into your vCenter environment and it knows what’s in there,” Thomas explained. “It was the simplicity of the solution that was really attractive.”

As the CIO for a major business, Thomas often finds himself overwhelmed by the multitude of solutions pitched to him for running enterprise IT. It’s an issue not just for him, but for other CIOs as well.

“I’ve talked to some colleagues, and they’re just going through vendor fatigue,” Thomas said. “There’s dozens and dozens of vendors, and it’s almost like some of them are trying to monetize on one little thing that I don’t really need. Usually, I’m approaching a vendor for a solution, not the other way around.”

Securing the enterprise

One element of enterprise IT that keeps CIOs up at night is security. The law firm does not employ a chief information security officer, so the responsibility for data backup, protection and incident response planning falls to Thomas.

“It’s not really about having the best firewall or the best outside protections,” Thomas said. “A lot of attacks are social engineering. They’re taking advantage of the ignorance of the users.”

Like many enterprises, GSK uses phishing simulation, innocuous-looking “fake” emails sent to employees that entice them to click on potentially malicious links or files. The campaigns have trained employees to ask IT first if they suspect the message, according to Thomas, yet he knows that keeping his own staff security conscious is just as important.

“There’s just basic things we don’t do,” Thomas said. “No, IT folks, we don’t keep things on our desktop. Keep stuff on the network; it will keep it protected.”

What advice would he offer to other CIOs? Thomas is a fervent believer in planning, which means keeping an eye on not just where technology may be today, but where it could be in the future.

“When you are thinking about the next thing for the firm or your company, you want to think long term as well, three to five years out,” Thomas said. “You don’t want to plan for just the immediate; you want to plan for the future. That’s what CIOs should be doing.”

Watch the second of the two video interviews with Thomas below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE