We all use the equivalent of Application Service Providers (ASP), though we do not call them that. For example, employees often have to fly to distant locations. Yet, your office does not own an airplane or have pilots on staff. Rather, employees use an airline when they have to make a trip. The ASP, similarly, frees legal services offices from purchasing and maintaining complicated computer equipment and hiring someone to support it. 

The computers that house the data and run the case management software are located at the ASP data center. Your office computers become, in effect, thin terminals when using the case management software over the Internet. 

An ASP allows the staff of an office to reach case management from virtually any location using almost any computer. The speed of the application is almost completely independent of the equipment being used by the staff member. If that computer can run an Internet Browser, the staff member can get to their cases. 

The ASP model offers many financial benefits. Compared with the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the software, network & hardware of an in-house WAN; the ASP offers a relatively low cost way of doing business. 

The ASP not only replaces your case management software, but it also eliminates the need for a WAN for case management purposes. All you need is a connection to the Internet with sufficient speed. Purchasing computer hardware upgrades is required less frequently. Because the case management runs on the remote computers housed at the ASP, a computer upgrade is only necessary if other software in the office requires it. 

There are no WAN servers in the central or branch offices, so having a technical person on staff travel around to maintain them is not necessary. Your technical staff can concentrate on how the software works and helping advocates, rather than keeping the hardware up and running.     

An ASP model is useful if you:
- Have multiple locations or telecommuters 
- Are facing significant hardware or software upgrades
- Are tired of trying to hire computer people or it has become too costly
- Want to use case management from any device, at any location through the Internet
- Are unhappy with your network reliability and security (including getting backups done)
- You do not want to install and/or manage a Wide Area Network for case management 

It is also useful if you want:
- Reduced overall costs for both management and hardware
- Seamless access to applications from remote offices and locations
- Faster application deployment and trouble-free upgrades
- An improved focus on what case management does, rather than maintenance and installation
- Your computer's speed to expand to match the size of your data (there is scalability)
- Enhanced security and redundancy
- To spread the cost out over time
- To be worry free about server and workstation setup
- High-speed performance independent of the computer being used
- Training and support to be handled centrally using "shadowing", eliminating the need for visiting each desktop to troubleshoot or install updates
- Low cost of entry and, commonly, an extremely short setup time
- A reduction or elimination of application administrative tasks
- Predictable application costs 

Virtually any computer that will run an Internet Browser will work. This includes computers that run Windows, Unix, Linux, Macintosh and Windows CE. In addition, you need a connection to the Internet of sufficient bandwidth. 

The processing is done on the Citrix Server at the ASP, which keeps the bandwidth requirements to a minimum. Only keystrokes and mouse-clicks are sent to the server. The server only returns screen updates. This keeps the transfer of information very low. The bandwidth requirement is from 12K to 20K per user. That means if you had five users in an office, you would need between 60K to 100K of bandwidth.

An office with a single location probably does not need an ASP, unless they wish to have all their applications at the ASP.