As companies look to move their collaboration solutions to the cloud, there are a few things to consider that happen after the cutover. There are areas that organizations can forget to address when moving to a new system.

Common issues that remain after cutover include third party applications integrated to the infrastructure, inconsistent management of multiple solutions, and finding someone to own the solution, support issues, and articulate the overall solution health.

Last spring, in the early days of the pandemic, we were a bit surprised to see that one of our fastest-growing product categories was touch screens. After all, people were still washing their groceries and sanitizing their hands every time they touched an elevator button to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But people were (wisely, it turns out) even more concerned about face-to-face communication, and businesses adopted digital displays to provide more opportunities for socially distanced communication.

Although pandemic restrictions are relaxing, digital signage will continue to grow as organizations seek more efficient ways to communicate important messages to customers, employees and partners.

As organizations adapt to new ways of working, they find themselves adopting and adapting new tools to meet their collaboration needs. For many companies, this has meant turning to Microsoft Teams as a centralized hub for communicating, sharing project resources and getting work done.

Teams is a powerful tool that allows remote workers to participate fully in workgroups, but this flexibility comes with new security responsibilities. IT professionals must make sure that Teams sites are fully secured and protected against unauthorized access. Here are six things you can do right now to lock down your organization’s Microsoft Teams deployment for secure remote work.

I recently spent time with the CISO of a global financial services company who found himself in a quandary. He knew that his company’s existing port and protocol firewall was woefully inadequate to protect the organization in today’s cybersecurity threat environment, but he couldn’t figure out a reasonable plan for moving to a next-generation platform.

The issue wasn’t funding or resources; his firm understood the importance of cybersecurity and was willing to invest both time and money in protecting its assets. Rather, he was facing significant pressure from his peers on operational teams to complete the migration without any downtime. After all, time is quite literally money in the financial services sector. Other teams were willing to cooperate with the migration but were not willing to endure any downtime.

As we talked through the issue, I explained that there simply wasn’t any way to carry out a firewall migration without any downtime, but that we could work together to develop a plan that would minimize the length of an outage and control the risk of implementing any new features. I’d worked with other customers under similar circumstances and used that knowledge to help my client build out a four-phase migration plan.

Organizations across industries migrate workloads to the public cloud to gain benefits such as worldwide availability and on-demand services. But for many, security is usually an afterthought in the development lifecycle. This reluctance is largely because it can seem daunting to do security well — but it doesn’t have to be. With help from cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, organizations can bake in security as they innovate.

A complimentary CDW Cloud Security Posture Assessment can show you how CSPM tools can help your organization streamline its cloud security efforts.

Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) have many benefits, but their key advantages are improving the user experience, leveraging WANs more efficiently, reducing costs and simplifying operations. Proper planning and design of an SD-WAN deployment makes for a smoother process while minimizing potential issues.

Optimizing an SD-WAN deployment, particularly a large-scale one, requires a structured methodology. It’s critical to spend time in the beginning on a thorough requirement-gathering process, which can reduce the number of issues that arise during deployment. Rigorous planning allows for better design, which in turn supports the development of templates that speed up deployment, reduce mistakes and take advantage of economies of scale.