CDW Expert

[sayit]While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. This was never more true than when, earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential…

[sayit]Many healthcare providers are facing unprecedented challenges in delivering care right now. IT support is key, especially for smaller hospitals and healthcare providers as they grapple with evolving threats and difficulties in sourcing necessary equipment. Tom Stafford, chief technology officer for CDW Healthcare and former CIO of Halifax Health, recently hosted a panel discussion detailing…

[sayit]Healthcare is facing unprecedented challenges in delivering care right now. IT support is key as hospitals and care providers grapple with evolving threats and difficulties in sourcing necessary equipment. Tom Stafford, chief technology officer for CDW Healthcare and former CIO of Halifax Health, recently hosted a panel discussion detailing what healthcare CIOs and directors are…

[sayit]Device as a Service — the subscription model for deploying mobile devices and endpoints — can not only simplify IT management, but also enable organizations to shift costs from a capital expense to an operating expense. Those outcomes are certainly attractive and worthwhile reasons to opt for a DaaS offering such as CDW's Managed Endpoint…

[sayit] Most organizations spend massive amounts of time, energy and financial resources trying to make their corporate networks as secure and reliable as possible. That’s important, of course — necessary, even. But it’s no longer sufficient. Many employees spend a significant portion (or even the majority) of their time working on cellular and wireless networks…

[sayit]Many organizations have embraced software-defined innovations such as the software-defined data center and the software-defined WAN, taking advantage of programmability and automation to simplify the management of their networks and other data center resources. What’s been missing, until recently, was a way to achieve the same benefits at the access layer of the network. The…

A few years ago, I was talking to an organization’s executive about the budget needed for a security initiative. We discussed the idea that organizations must understand that it’s not if they’ll be breached, but when. If a breach is inevitable either way, the executive asked, why should I spend all this money on security?…

On the TV show Hoarders, the subjects of the program often explain that they allow apparently useless items to pile up around their houses because they might need them someday. Regardless of its implications for household décor, this is a poor model for data management, but we see some organizations follow it nonetheless. In some…

The seemingly endless headlines about security and data breaches can lead us to believe that attackers have become more advanced than ever before. While perhaps their goals and approach are more organized, analysis of recent breaches suggests that their techniques, in fact, have not significantly evolved. As CDW looks back on the last three years…

When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect in May 2018, it posed a challenge for many organizations. But with more than a year of experience under their belts, most have been able to work through the growing pains of compliance and settle into new operational routines. Now that most of us…

Organizations across industries are expressing increased interest in data strategy. For many organizations, the initial reaction is to focus on the data itself; in reality, the data is only a small portion of what is important in a data strategy. Many IT and line of business leaders are surprised to learn the best place to…

The technologies used to create deepfake media — artificial audio, images and video generated by deep learning neural networks — have advanced significantly in the last two years. Many security experts have warned of the potential impact this false media could have on upcoming elections. Some researchers have begun to analyze the threats posed to…

For decades, disaster recovery has mostly followed a model: An organization copies data from its primary data center and stores it somewhere else (often on tape) for safekeeping, in case something goes wrong. Many organizations continue to think of DR in those terms, but the practice has moved forward. In fact, even the objectives behind…

Video collaboration in the customer engagement center (or contact center) makes sense for many of the same reasons the technology makes sense in other settings: When customers can see a human being on the other end of their conversations, they feel a human connection. When customer service representatives or sales staffers can see the people…

With the rise of ransomware attacks against organizations of all sizes, cybersecurity has become a top priority for even small businesses. Unfortunately, the unique challenges of a smaller organization can make securing the IT environment particularly difficult. IT staffs are typically stretched thin and asked to be knowledgeable across a variety of domains. Additionally, allocating…

At a meeting I attended recently, someone asked two new members of the sales team (both in their mid-20s) how they felt about email. They both said that they would use it if they had to, but that they preferred to communicate via text message. Now, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of email’s death…

Recent developments in the political arena have reignited the debate over intentionally placing backdoors into encryption technologies. Most experts in the security community are opposed to this for various reasons. However, some have suggested such backdoors really aren’t a big deal for businesses. On the contrary, there are significant tangible risks to the security provided…

CDW’s security engineers have conducted Threat Check security assessments for more than 500 organizations since launching the third version of this service one year ago. During a Threat Check, powerful security tools were deployed on an organization’s network to spot vulnerabilities and signs of a breach. As we’ve analyzed the results of those assessments, CDW…

Getting insights from our peers is one of the most important ways that IT and business leaders gain valuable information. In the security realm, we learn from each other about the threats we face as well as solutions, strategies and services that can help organizations address these threats. The latest version of “The Cybersecurity Insight…

[sayit]Many organizations migrate resources to the public cloud in part because they want to reduce their IT management burdens. By minimizing the footprint of their on-premises infrastructure, they hope to direct their internal IT staff away from routine maintenance and support tasks and toward more strategic projects that create value for the business. So, it…

In July 2018, CDW rolled out the third iteration of our Threat Check service. Since that version of the service rolled out, we’ve conducted hundreds of these assessments across a wide variety of companies and industries. In every case, we were able to provide our customers with new insights into the state of their cybersecurity…

Recently, I signed up for a subscription box service. Every month I’ll receive a curated selection of various baits and tackle to fuel my fishing obsession. The bait shop comes straight to my door. What a great time to be alive. If you’re not familiar with the subscription box craze, the model focuses on serving…

Using data to improve operations seems like a simple idea. But many organizations struggle to achieve this goal because they have trouble clearly understanding how operations perform when their data is scattered across multiple systems. Even when these systems have reporting built into them, their closed and static nature makes it difficult to find the…

I frequently see a common pattern in my customers’ use of containers — lightweight packaging to build, ship and run applications — in the data center. First, data center administrators download Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. They’ll experiment with the tools for a while, recognize the value…

Not that long ago, most police cruisers had a single internet-connected device: a rugged, in-vehicle laptop that allowed officers to securely connect to back-end servers, run license plate numbers and check for outstanding warrants. Today, the number of connected devices in a cruiser is limited only by police officials’ imaginations — or by the in-vehicle…

Cybersecurity has reached the boardroom. After years of clamoring for attention, the CEOs of U.S.-based corporations told the Conference Board that cybersecurity is their top external concern for 2019, ranking it above economic challenges, trade threats and political instability. Unfortunately, while executives are paying increased attention to security, the message they receive is often unclear.…

When International Women’s Day rolls around each year, I often think back to an experience I had a few years back. I had the fortunate opportunity to travel to X’ian, China, to see the incredible Terracotta Warriors. While trying to hold on for dear life during the bus ride, I managed to strike up a…

At the HIMSS19 healthcare IT conference this month, more than 40,000 attendees discussed the countless roles that technology can play in improving health and medicine. But in nearly every one of those discussions, security lurked as a critical consideration. Healthcare data is a resource of immense value, but it must remain secure. In a presentation…

If you’re a healthcare provider, it’s hard to keep up with the Joneses — or the Smiths, Johnsons, Browns and Williamses. Those are the five most common U.S. surnames. So in a major city, odds are high that some among the millions of people will share the same surname, first name and even birthdate. That’s…

In December 2015, more than 200,000 Ukrainians found themselves without power during a blackout cause by a cyberattack launched from within the Russian Federation. The attack was carried out by a spear-phishing campaign that was used to install malware on energy company computers. The malware, dubbed BlackEnergy, was specifically designed for use against industrial control…

In the past decade, organizations across all industries have come to realize that new technologies and methodologies can eliminate many of the management challenges that have traditionally been a part of supporting email and other applications. Today, the same thing is happening with storage, computing and networking. While cloud software has streamlined software support, technologies…

I live in Fort Myers in Southwest Florida. Our area has been experiencing a worsening water quality situation that has recently resulted in what is widely termed an “ecological disaster.” Large outbreaks of harmful algal blooms in both freshwater and saltwater ecosystems have led to devastating marine life die-offs and negative effects on human health…

I was part of a group from CDW that recently attended the biannual Technology & Services World (TSW) 2018 conference in Las Vegas. The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) puts on the event in part to help organizations such as CDW learn about creating cross-functional strategies for cost-effectively improving their customer engagement model. For myself,…

A poultry processing plant is a noisy place full of people, machinery and, of course, chickens. It’s probably not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of a modern digital enterprise, but the industry relies heavily on technology to facilitate supply chain operations, automate customer interactions and communicate between facilities. I recently…

In May, the digital world was awash in privacy practice notifications that inundated users on websites and in email inboxes. This wave came as companies doing business in the European Union prepared for the implementation deadline of the General Data Protection Regulation. Talking heads fueled a media frenzy of speculation regarding when EU supervisory authorities…

[sayit]Knowledge is power, but traditionally that power came at the price of owning and managing on-premises analytics tools. Analytics as a Service (AaaS) can significantly lower that cost, but often those savings aren’t the only or even primary reason to consider these solutions. AaaS is a term that’s often used too broadly. For example, some…

Misery loves company. If you want plenty of both, don’t bother developing a disaster recovery plan. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about a quarter of businesses do not reopen after suffering a disaster. That’s a lot of closures when you consider how many hurricanes, wildfires and floods have swept the country over the past couple…

Manufacturers favor “just in time” over “just in case” across the entire supply chain because it minimizes overhead expenses and fattens margins. But manufacturers, their suppliers and their customers are still leaving a lot of money on the table because they don’t have deep, real-time visibility into all of the factors that affect supply, demand…

Banks and other financial institutions collect a significant amount of data about their customers. Often, a customer will have checking and savings accounts with the same bank, as well as debit and credit cards and perhaps even a mortgage or a car loan. The customer may also use the bank’s website and mobile app. With…

At a recent trade show, someone referred to me as a software-defined networking veteran. This struck me as odd, because I’ve only been talking about SDN for five years, but also as being true — because I’ve been studying it for five years. I started speaking about this technology because it was so clear to…

October means that National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is back, and it’s always interesting to see what’s new in the security landscape from year to year. One thing that’s changed since last October is that the global Infrastructure as a Service market grew another 29.5 percent, to $23.5 billion, according to Gartner. And when we mark…

Within the seemingly incomprehensible maze of pipes and equipment of refineries, operators use decades-old technology to monitor and manage everyday tasks. But when developing an IoT and mobility strategy for these complex environments, don’t overlook where employees fit in — because automating workflow is as much about people as it is about things. That’s one…

The split between on-premises and cloud technologies isn’t new. Ask anyone who’s been in the world of computing for a while, and you’ll hear the topics of today as echoes from the past – think back to client-server or mainframe-and-dumb-terminal in the world of computing, or centrex and off-premises extension in the world of voice…

Today, Microsoft announced two significant changes to Windows 10 servicing timeframes. One of these changes is a welcome extension of the Windows 10 support lifecycle. However it only applies to half of the releases for two versions of Windows 10, while the support lifecycle for other versions remains unchanged. Confused? Let’s break down the changes.…

Between next-generation technologies such as software-defined networking, a never-ending flood of Internet of Things devices and a threefold increase in data traffic through 2021, enterprise IT environments keep getting bigger, busier and more complex. Add in the chronic shortage of IT professionals, and it’s clear that enterprises need a new, fundamentally different way of managing…

If you don’t measure something, it’s easy for problems to go unnoticed until it’s too late. It’s also tough to pinpoint the reasons why — and to know when they’ve been fixed. A digital transformation strategy that leverages the Internet of Things enables businesses to overcome those challenges. Digital transformation goes beyond mere digitization, which…

Leaders within most of the organizations I work with realize that data analytics must be a central component of their digital transformation efforts. But they often don’t understand the work that a robust analytics program entails. More than once, I’ve spoken with executives whose firms have purchased advanced analytics tools, and they’re confused about why…

In the previous installment in this blog series, I discussed the practical applications of using IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) technologies in the real world. In this installment, I’ll introduce Splunk and discuss how its platform delivers the benefits of ITOA. Introducing Splunk Splunk unleashes the power of machine data to help with IT operations, application…

With mass store closures by Sears, Toys “R” Us and other major brands, conventional wisdom says brick-and-mortar retail has one foot in the grave. Wrong. Online sales make up just nine percent of all retail sales, according to a new Deloitte study. The study also found that brick-and-mortar sales are actually growing — to the…

Most businesses recognize the obtainable benefits of unified communications (UC) cloud delivery platforms and are considering cloud options for their future communications solutions. However, many decision-makers also acknowledge the risks and challenges associated with a move to cloud. Existing substantial on-premises UC investments, particularly in more complex IT and telecom environments, can often delay cloud…

If you don’t talk to your business units about the Internet of Things, who will? IT history shows why that’s not a glib question. Over the past decade, many enterprises suffered embarrassing security breaches and hefty noncompliance fines because their business units signed up for a cloud service without IT’s blessing or even knowledge. Why?…

A few years ago, regional and midsized financial institutions raced to deploy customer-facing mobile apps, afraid of being left behind. When the dust settled, managers at many banks took a look around and realized that their apps were near copies of their competitors’. This was because most financial institutions launched their apps through their core…

Ok, I’ll admit, I, too, detest “…with this one weird trick” headlines. That said, it’s an incredibly common ask from the C-suite: “I would like to do a town hall meeting with X-hundred (or Y-thousand) employees, and I’d like to use this fancy videoconference room to do it.” To date, the answers to this request…

Not long ago, businesses typically directed high-end notebooks and mobile devices toward the C-suite, whether those executive users needed high-performance machines or not. Devices were a bit like wristwatches, valued for their ability to show off status nearly as much their ability to perform a task. Today, most organizations are becoming more strategic about device…

Collaboration means different things to different people, but everyone has to work with others some time. For many of us, this is more of a challenge than it has to be. Our collaboration often involves speaking with a colleague or a partner on the telephone, then following up via email. Later, if a colleague is…

In a 2016 survey of Chicago hotel workers, 58 percent said they’d been sexually harassed by guests. A year later, the city enacted an ordinance requiring hotels to provide employees who work alone with a portable panic button they can hit when they feel threatened or in danger. Similar ordinances are proposed or in effect…

[sayit]When it comes to safeguarding employees, customers and assets, the Internet of Things (IoT) offers plenty of new tools. Digital video surveillance is one of the most powerful types, but understanding its technological nuances is critical for maximizing both its effectiveness and your budget. K–12 education illustrates the top considerations, but they’re equally applicable to…

Servers are the heart of data centers, which means they can make or break a major initiative, such as migrating to a software-defined architecture or supporting high-performance computing. If your organization is gearing up for that kind of big change, consider upgrading to servers based on Intel Xeon Scalable processor architecture. The latest generation of…

With the Internet of Things (IoT), success doesn’t come just from connecting devices. It’s equally important to connect people. IoT’s big promise is enabling new, deep, actionable insights into every aspect of your business: people, processes, buildings, equipment and vehicles, to name just a few. But it can’t deliver on that digital transformation promise if…

There’s Big Data, and then there’s really Big Data. Case in point: oil and gas exploration, where 3D seismic images and reservoir models require 1 petabyte of storage and more than 18 petaflops of compute power to analyze. With an estimated 5.5 million Internet of Things devices coming online daily, Big Data is becoming the…

Most organizations have experienced the stomach-turning feeling of a security breach. The story generally goes the same way every time: An attacker discovers a previously undetected flaw in a security control and manages to leverage it to compromise other systems. After a lengthy investigation, the organization’s cybersecurity team discovers the root cause of the compromise…

Application development teams have embraced software delivery models that allow for the quick rollout of new code on a continuous basis. In a society that expects applications to be updated regularly and offer responsive feature-rich experiences, developers and IT operations must embrace methodologies and platforms that can empower them to constantly innovate. The days of…

Many businesses know some portions of their data are extremely valuable, while others have no value. The problem is, they often don’t know how to identify, much less take advantage of, data that can make a difference. The Internet of Things exacerbates this dilemma by giving organizations even more data to store and sift through.…

I’m currently working with a healthcare organization that is attempting to design the “hospital of the future.” It’s no surprise that this organization is adopting IT solutions to optimize patient care, but the hospital is spending just as much time and energy on improving the clinician experience. Why? For one, the hospital is trying to…

The capability is on the horizon: One day, IT teams will be able to leverage a software-defined data center (SDDC) to cut and paste live virtual machines from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and back again. And, they’ll be able to do so on a Tuesday afternoon when customers and departments are using those applications…

Recently, a Girl Scout asked me if I wanted to buy some cookies. I’m a sucker for Thin Mints, but I told the young fundraiser that I didn’t have any cash. No problem, she told me. She was accepting payments via a mobile app on her tablet. The point here isn’t that I bought a…

Roughly 18 percent of bank customers churn to a rival each year, Accenture says. Advertising and promos can attract their replacements, but it’s cheaper to keep the ones you have. It’s more effective — including in terms of cost — to make customer experience (CX) a key component of your digital transformation strategy. Consider another…

Last year, nearly 40 percent of industrial control systems worldwide experienced attacks from external sources, according to a Kaspaersky analysis. That’s a sobering statistic, especially when coupled with evidence that cyberattacks were involved in crippling power outages in the Ukraine in late 2015. The following year, closer to home, U.S. cybersecurity officials accused Iran of…

When patients are hospitalized, doctors track their blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen level and half a dozen other metrics. Some hospitals do a better job than others of using this data to arrive at real-time medical insights, but at least the information is available. When patients leave the hospital, however, their doctors often receive…

From an IT perspective, mergers and acquisitions activity often falls somewhere between a headache and a nightmare. The problems may begin with internal discussions and external negotiations, which typically involve the CEO and CFO. In many cases, the CIO and other IT leaders aren't brought in until the deal is done. This tendency is a…

Over the last few years, much of the IT industry has been affected by the "as a service" model, and this trend doesn't appear to be slowing. An IDC report from last year discussed a relative newcomer to this arena: Device as a Service (DaaS). IDC believes that DaaS has the potential to be extremely…

I work out of Madison, Wis., and one of my closest colleagues is based in Cleveland. We're rarely in the same room together. But when we see each other at an event, we don't go through the whole, "It's been a while, how've you been?" routine. Instead, we just pick up the conversation we were…

A couple of months ago, a higher education CIO I know came to me in a near panic. The university's provost (who had never before acknowledged the CIO by name) had just walked into his office and asked why the school didn't have a student-focused mobile app that a rival school offered. The CIO didn't…

Recently, I worked with leaders in a Texas school district who were making a conscious attempt to support modern pedagogical practices. They wanted to give teachers the freedom to change up room layouts to better enable collaboration, but teachers also needed students to sit in rows during portions of their classes. Changing the furniture around…

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining almost 200 security leaders from around the world for CDW's Managing Risk SummIT. One thing was clear from the many great conversations we shared: The world has changed. The security practices that helped us keep intruders out for the past two decades will not hold up against…

CDW recently partnered with IDG Research on a risk mitigation study that came to a startling conclusion: 46 percent of organizations have experienced a serious security breach, and an additional 22 percent experienced a “near breach.” Stop and think about that for a moment. More than two-thirds of organizations either suffered a breach or narrowly…

Recently, I asked a nonprofit executive how his organization planned to comply with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will go into effect in the European Union this spring. I expected him to rattle off a loose outline of steps that his IT team is taking to prepare for the GDPR guidelines. Instead,…

The holiday shopping season is inevitably followed by the return season. That’s been a headache for retailers and consumers alike since the dawn of trade, but e-commerce has turned it into a migraine. Why? Brick-and-mortar retailers are increasingly using immediacy and convenience to compete against e-tailers. Two ways are by giving customers the option of…

I look around. It’s a typical meeting — I am one of maybe four women in a room filled with 40 men. I feel a familiar tinge of isolation as my gaze wanders across the room. Growing up, I knew many girls who were fascinated by technology. Additionally, there are plenty of well-known programs today…

It was all the way back in 2009 that Cisco first began to integrate WebEx with TelePresence endpoints — hybrid cloud before hybrid cloud was the next big thing. At the time, it was called Cisco TelePresence WebEx One Touch, which begat WebEx One Touch 2.0, which then begat WebEx Enabled TelePresence, which then became…

Over the last few years, the concept of “modern management” of PCs has grown. In a nutshell, modern management is using cloud-based services to provide various PC management functionalities such as inventory, policy enforcement, update scanning and deployment, and application deployment. Modern management is essentially using mobile device management (MDM) software to perform functions that…

[sayit]When we talk about digital transformation, we tend to think first of end-user devices and edge uses: smart objects, automated operations and streamlined processes. But none of those solutions or outcomes is possible without the right back-end infrastructure to support it. Forward-looking organizations must move beyond a “keep the lights on” mentality and strategically design…

Over the years, I’ve seen a remarkable shift in the way organizations approach their cybersecurity strategies. After the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) debuted, most security programs focused on compliance issues. Organizations scrambled to ensure their operations were up to par before the…

"This stuff is hard,” said Michael Glover, vice president of IT Infrastructure at a Fortune 500 retail company. “Either I put the wrong workloads into the public cloud, which should have stayed on-prem, my monthly bill jumps 70 percent from its usual baseline, or I can't find an excellent cloud resource for mundane, too-deep-in-the-weeds development…

Today’s business world is in the midst of a massive transition, with 78 percent of small businesses projected to have fully adopted cloud computing by 2020. To be sure, cloud technology has changed the way we approach business challenges, leading to new opportunities for scalability, cost efficiency and innovation. The question is, how do you…

In the previous installment in this series, I made the case for utilizing IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) technologies. In this post, the focus will be on the practical application of these technologies in the real world. The Benefits According to IDC, the principal benefits of IT Operations Analytics include the following: Avoidance of service interruptions,…

When I walk into IoT Envisioning Workshops with customers, they often greet me with wide eyes and excited voices, energized by visions of the Internet of Things with connected campuses where virtually every physical object collects and transmits huge volumes of valuable data. This is understandable, as much of the literature around IoT focuses on…

No one likes to be thought of as a collection of 0s and 1s, but in today’s digital world, that’s what it sometimes feels like when we interact with businesses that treat us impersonally. Businesses that want to transform their relationship with customers need to create more personalized experiences, speakers said at a recent CDW…

Most IT budgets are spent maintaining existing systems, so many organizations find it difficult to invest in innovation. New technologies can feel particularly overwhelming for small and midsized businesses, where resources are often limited, speakers said at a recent CDW summit, “Transforming the Customer Experience with Digital Modernization,” in New Orleans. However, there are simple…

One Button to Push (OBTP) is one of Cisco’s marquee TelePresence and videoconferencing features. With OBTP, meetings scheduled by end users for a conference room appear in a list on the room’s display, and video- or WebEx-enabled meetings offer a “big green button” to join the meeting on the device’s touch control pad. This radically…

There are nearly 30 million small and midsized businesses (SMBs) across the U.S., and obviously, not all of them could be present at VMworld this summer. But luckily, one of the most compelling conversations of the event came when Chris Wolf, chief technology officer for VMware, spoke with CDW about technologies that offer plenty of…

To safeguard your business from human errors, process mix-ups, failures in technology and natural disasters, a reliable backup and recovery solution is essential. Varying types of restore options, from individual files to complete virtual or physical machines, can be a fast and efficient way to recover from mishaps. Backup software has greatly evolved over the…

It may seem obvious, but in 2017 the vast majority of businesses are completely dependent on technology. This technology is housed in corporate data centers, the cloud or some combination of the two. What may be less obvious to many people is that a single large problem or a culmination of many small problems previously…

Microsoft Ignite is taking place in Orlando this week. As expected, there have been numerous announcements that will have wide-ranging impacts on the industry going forward. As I did last year for Ignite 2016, this post is a collection of observations and my thoughts on what some of this means for the industry. This is…

Apple revolutionized modern mobility — introducing the world to pocket-sized devices with the iPod, and then changing modern computing forever with the iPhone and the iPad. Cisco, meanwhile, is considered by many IT professionals to represent excellence in networking. If enterprises are going to get the most out of their mobility initiatives, then, it makes sense…

When Phillips Manufacturing began using Adobe Creative Suite, it purchased different licenses for users at various times, acquiring multiple versions of the software. The resulting software environment required a lot of maintenance and created management challenges for the small business, based in Omaha, Neb. Moving to Adobe Creative Cloud, which delivers the applications in the…

I have been fortunate to work for some very complex and mature IT departments throughout my career, and one of the more important practices I saw within these IT shops was a solid disaster recovery and business continuity strategy. As an IT business person that has participated on all sides of the disaster recovery and…

Most organizational leaders understand that Internet of Things (IoT) technologies — and the digital transformation that can stem from the insights they provide — are rapidly becoming essential to driving an evolution in the workplace that creates value and improves the work environment for employees. But many leaders still don’t know what that will look…

In business, we often ask how we can be more valuable to our customers. But, according to Michael Schrage, research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, there’s another question that we don’t ask often enough: How can we make our customers more valuable to us. At CDW’s Improving Productivity with Digital Transformation Summit…

Business operations and IT operations depend on the real-time knowledge provided by IT operations analytics (ITOA) technologies to keep their respective customers happy. Complexity Is on the Rise Organizations rely on IT infrastructure for all facets of their business operations. As the continued adoption of digital transformation strategies drive business operations to become increasingly complex,…

The main IT challenge that many organizations face is simple: Cybercriminals continue to get better at what they do. In addition to being smarter and better funded, they’re also more organized. Indeed, a lot of the cybercrime we see today is carried out by organizations that are run like businesses, with clear hierarchies and solid…

Office 365 offers several ways to address content collaboration needs. Over time, you’ll find that OneDrive for Business, Groups, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams combine to provide a cohesive content collaboration solution. As Office 365 solution architects, my team is frequently asked to explain the benefits and capabilities of OneDrive for Business. Although it is an…

It’s no secret that the cloud has changed the IT landscape. Virtually every enterprise is looking at some form of cloud computing as an integral part of their IT strategy; according to Market Media Research, cloud computing spend will exceed $270 billion by 2020. That is a bullish forecast, however, that doesn’t mean that all…

Not long ago, educators could view digitally enabled learning as a useful enhancement to traditional teaching techniques. No more. Technology has become such a dominant force in the classroom — and in society — that educators must do more than just try to leverage it for their own purposes. To remain fully relevant in an…

“It’s not about IoT,” said Steve Darrah, director of national solution services at Intel. “It’s about what you can do with it.” Internet of Things technologies are having a major impact on numerous industries, as Darrah and other experts stated during a panel discussion at CDW’s Improving Productivity with Digital Transformation Summit this spring. For…

The entrepreneurial spirit and technology acumen of the United States provide reason for optimism in the fight against cybercriminals, said former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. At the helm of the FBI from September 2001 through September 2013, Mueller came to view cybercrime as a top threat to the U.S., but when organizations pulled…

In the first blog of this series, Components of a Holistic Mobility Solution we described several components that are integral to a full mobility solution. This included the management of devices and applications, applications and client virtualization, data access and protection as well as identity management. In this post, we are going to discuss mobile…

A common oversight I’ve seen customers make in my role as a Senior Software Services Manager at CDW is they often develop a business plan for adopting a new solution and show an attractive return on investment (ROI) dependent upon increased productivity, but they lack a plan to ensure their users adopt the solution in a…

While you might get a text from your dentist reminding you of an appointment or you might be able to hold a table at your favorite restaurant online, in the small and medium business (SMB) market — especially the sub-200 seat space — dial-tone, voicemail and basic unified communications (UC) features are still the norm.…

We are living in exciting times, especially those of us who work in IT. The technological changes going on all around us are, historically, on par with previous leaps in human development. For businesses, technology offers tools that allow them to compete and thrive. It gives them the ability to apply intelligence and process management…

Getting hacked is nothing new, as the recent “WannaCry” ransomware aptly demonstrates. Organizations have been fending off malware for years. But a virus outbreak back in 2005 was far less sophisticated than any of today’s attacks. Even ransomware — basic automated software that enterprises fight daily — can bring an organization to a standstill. Although…

Healthcare providers are considering a growing number of digitally enabled devices that have the potential to dramatically improve clinical care while driving down costs. These devices offer providers a major opportunity to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) in coming years. Although discussions about IoT typically focus on data analytics and clinical use cases, healthcare…

The makers of endpoint security solutions must deal with a constantly changing threat landscape and new attack types, but ransomware has evolved beyond nearly any threat we’ve seen before. It’s the next generation of malicious code, and it’s pandemic. An organization that fails to establish a plan of defense against ransomware is essentially leaving its…

Telemedicine has been on the scene since the early days of the internet when the federal government looked to provide rural patients with access to the same kind of healthcare expertise that was available in large urban centers. While telemedicine has been available since at least the 1990s, results from CDW's 2017 Patient Engagement Perspectives Study…

There are more than a few manufacturers of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliances. And I meet with customers every week and try to explain to them why they should care about it. To me, HCI really should be boiled down to three components. The first is the hardware – what you can see and touch in…

The WannaCry ransomware attack has been big news since Friday, May 12, 2017, and organizations are scurrying to understand and mitigate the risk from this attack. The following is a very quick summary of the attack and specific action steps you can take to help protect your organization. This type of ransomware is unique because…

The rise of the internet with its open sharing of medical research and the explosion in health-related sites has created a much savvier healthcare consumer. High-quality healthcare costs a lot of money today, and patients are asking more questions about their care than ever before. In fact, CDW’s 2017 Patient Engagement Perspectives Study found that…

In a span of 30 years, the average person in the United States has gone from explicitly asking the phone company to not publish their phone number in the phone book to sharing every intimate detail of their life on social media. It seems people have lost the understanding of the value of privacy. It is…

In 2013, global digital data weighed in at 4.4 zettabytes (a zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes). IDC predicts that figure will leap to 180 zettabytes by 2025. The amount of data that organizations must manage is growing in size, complexity and value. Unfortunately, while most organizations feel that growth and complexity, they don’t see comparable…

The word mobility brings to mind certain things, such as phones, tablets, and mobile workers. In many instances, it also brings to mind the need for a mobile device management (MDM) solution, but there is much more to consider when thinking of a holistic mobility solution. This blog post is the first in a short…

The most pressing demands of data centers in 2017 can be summed up in two words: simplicity and performance. Data center managers are seeking to reduce complexity while shrinking the barriers between data and the customer. A key part of this initiative is replacing the mechanical disk with solid-state drives (SSDs). In fact, data center…

Major hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure provide a high number of nines percentage (e.g., 99.99999 percent) of application uptime per year. However, as they are complex systems, they still cannot guarantee perfection. This fact was highlighted by an outage on Feb. 28, 2017, attributable to human error, which affected multiple…

The volume of cybersecurity threats that organizations face has become overwhelming. At CDW’s recent Managing Risk Summit in Washington, D.C., leading security experts described how cybercriminals continue to use innovative techniques, including malware, ransomware and compromised credentials, to gain access to enterprise networks and compromise valuable data. “How do you think hackers think of their…

According to Greek mythology, the giant Argus Panoptes had 100 eyes, making him the perfect watchman, because only a few eyes would sleep at any given time. Cisco must’ve found a few of them on the Svalbard Islands, in the far northern part of Norway (Norway being home of TelePresence endpoint development at Cisco), to…

Do you know where your data is? If your organization is like most, you may have your email on Microsoft Exchange, your virtual environment through VMware and you may even have an application or two living in Amazon Web Services. Then, there is all the data sitting on your physical infrastructure, as well as the…

As organizations become more comfortable with the overall security of cloud computing, many are now embracing the cloud for greater speed to market and increased flexibility. The cloud has proven to be a cost-effective anytime means of consuming and managing technology. Today, more companies are taking advantage of cloud-based opportunities to scale up and down…

Digital healthcare is becoming increasingly important as healthcare providers strive to achieve the “Triple Aim” objectives of improved patient experience, improved population health and lower costs. Digital healthcare is an ecosystem, optimized to align with the needs of practitioners, staff and — most important — the patient population. It’s made up of interconnected, interoperable physical…

We’ve come to think of copying or transferring data as actually “moving” or “flowing,” like water through pipes or tubes. A popular, silly characterization of the internet as a “series of tubes” went viral in 2006 and was widely lampooned or adopted as fact, depending on the observer’s level of knowledge. But, of course, what…

Despite all the noise from analysts and vendors pushing enterprises toward the promised land of pervasive video collaboration by video-equipping smaller conference and huddle rooms (as they should!), Cisco continues to keep a parallel focus on video conferencing in the larger conference room, board room and special events room segments. I don’t mean to dismiss…

Of the hundreds of millions of individuals and corporations across the globe who own desktops, notebooks and mobile devices, only a small percentage of people understand how they work beyond controlling the applications they commonly use. These devices are tools used to perform a task and don’t require you to understand how they work to…

I’ve talked to thousands of IT leaders about the software-defined data center (SDDC) and what it can deliver: cost savings, efficiency gains, consolidation, management improvements and automation. To get to the point where they can reap these rewards, though, IT leaders need a forward-looking mindset, focused on infrastructure and business alignment. The first glimpse into…

Over the last three years, IT decision-makers put a wide range of assets from software to infrastructure into the cloud. One of the main drivers for cloud adoption was cost. A cloud migration strategy offered IT professionals a diverse array of solutions for running services at lower cost. And the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model allowed enterprises…

Collaboration tools such as Dropbox, Box and Microsoft OneDrive for Business have been a boon for business productivity. These easy-to-use cloud services provide intuitive file sharing to help untether workers from their office PCs and enable integration with productivity solutions such as Office 365 and SharePoint. With features like integrated version control, file discovery and…

If national publications are calling attention to the health hazards of sitting, and if K–12 students are always sitting in the classroom, we’ve got a problem. In fact, we have several problems. Beyond the deleterious effects of so much time off their feet (such as restlessness and inability to focus), students who sit for too…

Many IT teams purchase storage systems in much the same way people buy cars. If you're a car buyer like me, you take your time, think about it and order the car you want. You really understand the car you currently have and the car you’re going to drive, including the technologies that have changed…

[sayit]CDW helps customers of all sizes migrate to software-defined networking in their data centers. Use cases for SDN vary as widely as do the types of customers. IT automation, programmability, service chaining, multitenancy, private cloud, disaster recovery and microsegmentation – all are buzzwords that float around in every SDN conversation. Why Companies Are Adopting SDN…

While speaking to a Chicago group about security recently, I picked someone out of the audience and asked him to tell me his password. He looked at me like I was up to no good. “Let me guess,” I said. “Is it at least eight characters with one number and one special character?” He said…

Think about the last live sporting event you attended. Did you have great seats? Did you head in the wrong direction when you got to the concourse on a mission for nachos? Did you pick up a couple of jerseys for your kids? Did you miss a big play waiting in line for the restroom?…

In 2009, I had the pleasure of being part of a small audience for a Q&A with John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco, and a statement he made greatly changed my career. When asked about competition, Mr. Chambers replied, I don’t worry about the competition, I worry about technology transitions. At CDW, we have a…

Managing enterprise-owned computers is an important responsibility for any IT department. A management product like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) provides a significant amount of power and process for performing this task. Traditionally, products like this have done a fantastic job of managing systems that are on the internal network, but managing “internet-based” clients…

A few years ago at a PTA meeting I attended, there was a request for a volunteer to help sponsor a SMART Girls Club for fourth and fifth grade girls. The club was run by the YWCA and promoted Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) to young girls. Despite having two boys, I found myself…

Mobile technology is a major challenge for IT managers. The number of mobile devices — particularly smartphones — that connect to enterprise networks has skyrocketed over the past few years. Managing that kind of growth is no small task, which is why it's a good idea to consider partnering with a reseller (rather than directly…

The evolution of cloud-based file sharing toward full-blown collaboration services started with shifts in the way we work. How we work has changed; where we work has changed; and the devices we work on have changed.  The consumerization of IT and the idea of people bringing their personal devices such as smartphones, tablets and notebooks…

The advent of mobile devices has spawned new and exciting ways for healthcare workers to communicate with one another as well as provide innovative services to patients, especially those in remote offices and branches. The first wave of mobile devices included personal digital assistants, followed by smartphones and tablets. The latest iterations of these smart…

Many organizations are turning to bots — software code designed to automate time-consuming tasks — to save time and money. For instance, AT&T’s Technology and Operations automation team developed bots to handle routine, time-consuming duties such as creating engineering work orders and updating systems for network-boosting activities. Here at CDW, collaboration solution architect Sankar Nair…

What type of customer experience do you want your brand to represent? We’ve helped a lot of retailers and restaurants realize their vision for a superb customer experience through well-planned and thoughtful use of advanced technology. And we’ve come to understand the many distinctions between retail and restaurant customer engagement. I bring up that point…

Microsoft has made substantial changes to the Azure pricing model across the channel effective October 2016.  One of the major reasons for this change was an effort to eliminate the discount complexity across various programs which were often difficult and cumbersome to explain and calculate.  This will help to improve the transparency, consistency and simplicity…

“Just make it happen!” When a business sets a new direction, its IT department is expected to just make it happen. It could be a merger, acquisition, divestiture, new initiative or a new office. If you’re a seasoned IT pro, you’ve received the call or been in the meeting where IT is looked at like…

Every few years, most companies are faced with an important choice with their collaboration infrastructure. Do you decide to do a one-time, in-place upgrade of your on-premises infrastructure, or do you choose to retire your legacy environment and go with a cloud communications solution instead? Before you decide to upgrade your on-premises collaboration infrastructure, consider…

Services from major cloud providers are the future of IT.  The days of corporations owning massive amounts of IT infrastructure to run their businesses are numbered because doing that, with the associated capital and operational investments, is no longer necessary.  A shift will continue toward the purchase of hardware infrastructure only necessary to provide access…

Let’s face it. Teleportation is probably not going to happen in my lifetime. Well at least the kind of dematerialization/rematerialization that you see on Star Trek where I say “Beam me up, Scottie,” then find myself back on the Starship after visiting a strange and distant world not less than two seconds earlier. Nonetheless the…

On January 29, 2016, Cisco announced the acquisition of the privately held Acano. And several months later, a new baby was born – Cisco Meeting Server. Just kidding! In reality, Cisco has taken what they’ve bought (Acano’s excellent technology) and introduced it to the Cisco Collaboration family with the recent release of Cisco Meeting Server…

As many enterprises move to a more mobile workforce and adopt cloud technologies for their applications and workloads, the applications themselves are becoming more demanding with higher minimum requirements. This means that connectivity and the performance of that connectivity is becoming a critical component of any enterprise’s success. How do enterprises improve upon an already…

Despite being a significant risk, even in organizations that deal with sensitive data such as personal health information (HIPAA) and credit card data (PCI), printer security is often overlooked. After all, printers are usually easy to configure and tend to keep working until some mechanical failure takes place. This risk is a particular problem with…

Last week, Microsoft held the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta. This post is a collection of observations and inferences from what Microsoft announced or the data that was presented in various sessions. With an event the size of Ignite, this should not be seen as an attempt to be comprehensive. These are simply my observations…

Cisco Systems’ HyperFlex platform brings significant benefits to a wide variety of industries. From online retailers to major health care providers, hyperconvergence is arriving in data centers and transforming enterprise IT. If we want a closer look at the application of HyperFlex in a specific industry, higher education stands out as an ideal candidate. The…

Gone are the days where IT managers show interest in the traditional stack for most of their workloads. After all, when you walk into a data center and see all the blinking lights, you’re reminded that those lights represent lots of issues that you need to attend to. From connecting the numerous management interfaces; to…

The IT industry is experiencing a major transition within the data center. The days of strictly defined server, network and storage silos will soon be behind us. The data center is no longer about just hardware; it is about applications and software. Application development has changed, and agile application development has gone mainstream. Traditional applications,…

Video has become an integral part of our daily lives. We have cameras with us just about everywhere — in conference rooms, at our desks, on our notebooks and on our smartphones. Interestingly though, while many people think nothing of engaging in video chats with friends or family members on Facetime or Facebook Messenger, they…

In the not-so-distant past (that may be yesterday for some organizations), setting up video conference calls could be a fairly arduous task for users in enterprise environments. All participants had to have the same type of system to communicate with their fellow workers. Plus, someone from the IT department typically had to show up 10…

Hyperconvergence platforms are making their way into data centers around the world as technology professionals work to provide their organizations with the IT infrastructure they will need to support operations for years to come. As with any new technology, organizations adopting a hyperconvergence strategy or planning to move in that direction should view this transformation…

Change comes regularly to enterprise data centers. These facilities, often built to house expensive mainframes and their caretakers, continue to provide the essential power, cooling and environmental controls required to support enterprise IT operations. More than a decade ago, administrators rolled those mainframes out on a forklift, and replaced them with racks and racks of…

With more than 350 million devices now running Windows 10, the Microsoft operating system has become one of the most widely used platforms in the world. Last month at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, the company announced a host of new projects that will improve the security and management of its suite of collaboration, cloud…

Technology’s role is shifting. And with it, IT staffs are no longer just tasked with keeping things up and running. They’re expected to drive real business results and contribute to the bottom line. But you’ve got a complex infrastructure to manage, and getting bogged down in maintenance means foregoing opportunities to innovate. Unfortunately, the more…

If you have invested in any of Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions – such as Azure, Office 365, Intune and Enterprise Mobility Suite – it is likely you’ve heard the term Digital Partner of Record or DPOR for short. However, most customers are at least a little unclear – and even hesitant – on actually naming a…

As businesses grow and cloud capabilities expand, the focus is shifting to an operations approach that harnesses the cloud’s ability to improve disaster recovery, development and testing, application delivery and virtualized desktop environments. Aggregating your data center to a cloud solution gives you a few, broad-reaching benefits. Most importantly, it creates a nimble organization. But…

In disaster recovery, one size doesn’t fit every company, every budget, or even every IT workload that you need to safeguard.  Flexibility is the key.  But research indicates that nearly half of all companies don’t have a disaster recovery solution in place at all.  That is surprising because the stakes are higher than most people…

Technology can prove to be a game-changer for retailers, but only when it’s applied properly. Many retailers implement electronic commerce platforms to quickly bring products to customers. Additionally, they invest in technology, such as retail analytics, to understand how to better engage with them through a variety of channels, including physical stores, online or mobile…

[sayit]It’s a great idea to lock the front door of your house, but it doesn’t do you much good if you leave the garage door open when you drive away. Unfortunately, this is an accurate analogy for the monthly patching process at many companies. Patching security vulnerabilities is an important part of every company’s IT…

By Jason Brown and Chris Coughlin, CDW Mobility Architects In today’s work environment, where a single user sometimes carries three or more mobile devices, organizations may find it tempting to give up on the idea of any IT control over mobile users. But that’s a mistake. Poorly managed mobile deployments can create serious headaches for…

Retailers face increasing pressure to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, while controlling operational and capital costs at the same time. Retail IT leaders should be on the lookout for technology solutions and services that help to streamline processes and aligns technology disseminated across tens of thousands of locations. That’s where CDW’s pre-ship configuration can play…

Bus and rail passengers want the same sort of digital experience they’ve come to expect elsewhere — the ability to access and engage with information anytime, anywhere and on any device. As a result, we’re seeing many transit agencies starting to explore or implement Wi-Fi to retain existing riders and attract new ones. It’s truly…

The leaders I meet with are rarely focused on storage—they’re thinking about larger strategic initiatives; accelerating product development, moving to IT as a Service (ITaaS), and deploying private clouds. But ironically, it’s often storage that’s the bottleneck for these broader initiatives. Now, that’s not the fault of storage itself, but rather the fault of the…

It’s not coincidental that your contact center gets thrust into the mire of compliance issues. When you think about it, it’s easy to see why. Many companies with contact centers work in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare, for example. Usually the goal is to keep these high-touch, customer-facing employees from a) publicly…

CDW has been in the networking business for a long time, and over the decades, we’ve seen amazing innovation while working with partners like Cisco Systems and Intel. Indeed, that’s been my experience in my six years with the company. But nothing compares to the sea change we are experiencing now with the Internet of…

On May 17th, Meraki “put a quarter up” with their brand new Meraki Communications platform and its hardware star, the MC74 IP phone. The Meraki Communications launch device: the MC74 IP phone. To date, most people know Meraki best for their MR-series wireless access points and “Dashboard,” their industry-leading cloud-based network management system.  Over time,…

Users no longer have to depend on their organization’s IT department to get the technology they need, insomuch that they can download apps to their mobile devices. They can activate cloud services with a few keystrokes or have a managed service provider build them customized systems, all without having the IT staff aware that this…

Today, enterprise networking is at a very interesting and dynamic state. With the availability of LAN bandwidth speeds of 40GB and 100GB in the data center, virtual switching technologies with all links forwarding traffic, creative new Quality of Service (QoS) configurations, application optimization, intelligent path control and the addition of automated orchestration, the possibilities today…

The software an organization’s IT staff provides can directly impact overall performance. Unfortunately, technology leaders often neglect software deployment best practices, investing time and effort in shopping for new products instead of optimizing those already in use. As a result, the organization realizes fewer benefits and a lower return on investment — even on good…

Whenever I get a request for a phone conference without a video option, it surprises me. As a business video solution architect for CDW and someone who has decades of experience in the technology industry, I’ve seen the impact video can have. Every notebook has a webcam, and video conferencing tools have become ubiquitous in…

CDW was selected as one of the few partners to attend the internal “wolf pack” training on Cisco Tetration Analytics.  We spent several days with Cisco engineers from around the globe gaining hands-on experience with Tetration.  Tetration is a very impressive product today; however, its potential is beyond incredible. Tetration, which was developed by former…

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has come a long way in healthcare. It is a far cry from a few years ago when I would say the phrase “IaaS” in meetings and get the following response: “We like the ability to hug our servers.” But times are changing. IT managers are faced with the need…

A good penetration tester is curious, creative and persistent. We are unique, coming from many different walks of life, all driven by a desire to understand security weaknesses and risks – and how to keep others from exploiting them. Learn how CDW can help you find and stop today's attacks. Cyber Detectives Our mission is…

At this point, it seems as though every business has pressed their face against the glass and looked into the cloud market. Some out of necessity, others for curiosity, and some because well, someone said they should. Regardless of the motivation, nearly every business is interested to know, “What are other businesses like ours doing…

Whether it’s SaaS, IaaS, or a hybrid—cloud services are fast becoming part of IT delivery for nearly every business. The number of companies, health care systems and academic organizations investigating cloud services continues to grow, and as a result the adoption of cloud deployment is skyrocketing. It’s really no wonder—provisioning hosted servers is now as…

Simplifying a complex, aging web of infrastructure components leads to more satisfied customers — and greater revenue. Every business wants to increase revenue and decrease costs while mitigating risks and the restaurant industry is no different. Improving the effectiveness of technology can boost customer satisfaction, which goes hand-in-hand with increased revenue. A better bottom line…

Unified Communications as a Service, otherwise known as UCaaS, is a suite of applications that allow companies to communicate via IP and unify their communications on a single platform. Although options vary by provider and customer need, solutions generally consist of a hosted phone system, network management tools, conferencing and collaboration tools, hosted contact center…

Analytics is transforming retail in myriad ways — a significant aspect of which is the ability to harness and analyze machine data, making a substantial impact to the bottom line for many retailers. Machine data is one of the most rapidly expanding categories of data capture today.  Everything from mobile devices, web sites and POS…

Unlimited vacation time. Conference calls during the morning commute. Checking in with clients from a pediatrician’s waiting room. These are just a few examples of how today’s messaging applications are blurring the boundaries of work. Users can decide how, when and where they get their jobs done. These apps present great opportunities for bringing efficiencies to…

As part of the company’s push toward hybrid cloud, Windows Server 2016 will focus on per–processor core licenses. Microsoft has made a number of major licensing changes in the last month as the company reorganizes its licensing structure around hybrid cloud. Even for a dedicated licensing professional it’s a lot to follow, let alone a…

Password management often contributes to the “nightmare scenario” for just about everyone in a work environment. For employees, it’s having too many accounts in too many places, and the Post-it note in the desk drawer is too darn small! For IT help-desk staff, it’s the endless phone calls from employees that can’t remember their password…

Mobility has become a central fact of work operations. Whether you want to make it easier for your customers to buy from you than from your competitors, or ensure that staff can stay productive 24/7 — or both — you need great mobile apps. Unfortunately, no organization has unlimited resources to throw at mobile app…

With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft introduced the concept of servicing branches, which include Current Branch (CB), Current Branch for Business (CBB) and Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB). Each branch has a place in an overall Windows management strategy. While Microsoft offers guidance for where each branch fits, the reasoning behind the guidance is…

Cloud. Has there ever been a five-letter word that brings to mind so many different ideas and concepts? Ask for a definition and you will find nearly every person has a different answer. Some execs believe the operational agility provided by such elasticity frees up their staff to focus on more strategic efforts, while allowing them…

If you’re responsible for managing software licenses in your organization, you know that it’s a complex mix of art and science. It’s ever-evolving: Software publishers continually roll out new programs, revise contract terms and introduce new delivery models. On top of that, vendor audits mean there’s minimal margin for error in getting it right. In…

The relevance of VoIP implementations in the marketplace continues to grow as a result of gains in flexibility, customization and integration. Industry analyst firms peg the rate of growth at something in excess of 20 percent per year.  The emergence of several developments related to VoIP are becoming more apparent and together they reveal the…

Amazon may be the 800-pound gorilla in modern retailing, but it’s not without weaknesses that savvy competitors can exploit. Consider this: A coffee connoisseur is eyeing a highly rated espresso maker but has a question about how the milk frother works. The site’s crowdsourced Q&A on the product offers no ready answer to her question,…

Many of you may have heard about the DROWN attack on SSL/TLS encryption in the media over the last week or so, not to mention previous issues such as the Heartbleed Bug.  I wanted to take a moment though to talk about the former and its impact on businesses worldwide. “DROWN” stands for “Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened…

What is cloud? That question is asked of me daily by many IT professionals. If you look up the definition in Webster’s Dictionary, you will see it states cloud is, “A great crowd or multitude; a vast collection.” Now, I am pretty sure you didn’t get up from your desk while reading this blog to…

I’m a highly mobile worker. So, like many workers, I’m always looking for better ways to improve my productivity, no matter where I am. Call it a “mobile office.” Call it a “virtual workspace.” We’re all looking for the magic formula that will ensure that we can access the applications, data and services we need…

Mobilizing a business requires more than simply providing users with mobile devices and popular off-the-shelf apps. To really move the needle on productivity, companies need custom mobile apps that empower people to perform critical processes anytime and anywhere. When it comes to developing custom mobile apps, two principles in particular are critical: Apps must deliver…

Digital technology on the factory floor is nothing new: Many manufacturers already incorporate automation and sensors into their production lines. But a broad move is under way to integrate these types of operational technologies (OT) with enterprise IT. When OT and IT work together as part of the Internet of Things (IoT), information from the…

Collaboration offers tremendous benefits to healthcare. Healthcare is, after all, inherently collaborative. Doctors, nurses and other clinical staff all constantly collaborate to ensure that patients receive proper care. When this goes well, patients get quality care at a lower cost. When it doesn’t, care suffers and costs go up.. The same goes for collaboration. It’s…

As life becomes increasingly digital, the need for mobility keeps growing. As a result, businesses need more Wi-Fi, which in turn drives demand for greater network density and performance from the wired networks that support Wi-Fi access points (APs). One way to meet this demand is to upgrade from 1 Gigabit Ethernet to the next…

As part of its Penetration Testing services, the CDW Security Assessment team analyzes passwords – A LOT of passwords. Whenever we are able to obtain administrator privileges through our testing, which is most of the time on internal assessments, we perform an analysis of password security. We start the process by “dumping” the encrypted passwords…

When discussing Office 365 capabilities, it becomes clear that many customers need a better way to secure and manage their data in the context of their legal and regulatory needs. These three topics arise in nearly every conversation: How well can I control my data? How well can I secure my data? How do I…

Today’s customers expect more from retailers than ever before. In the age of always-improving technology, customers want a convenient, seamless shopping experience, whether they’re making their purchases online or in the store. Luckily for retailers, the same technologies that embolden customers are also empowering forward-thinking companies. Smartphones, tablets and other devices connected through the Internet…

What if your smartphone could make a virtual dragon appear to be napping on your dining room table? Or what if you could use your tablet to see how new furniture would look in your actual living room? According to the experts, such scenarios are possible — and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in…

New Year’s resolutions provide an opportunity to focus on important things that may have slipped through the cracks the previous year.  While resolutions typically center on goals like losing weight or saving for that trip to Cabo San Lucas, IT managers can also use the new year to rededicate themselves to improving their organizations’ security…

This past year was the biggest one yet for the Solutions Blog team. We covered a tremendous amount of ground in the I.T. field and had more bloggers than ever before. The website also got a much-needed facelift to make searching topics and browsing solution areas even easier. We’re looking forward to providing I.T. thought…

Microsoft has released the much-anticipated follow up to the market-leading System Center 2012 Configuration Manager. This release introduces fundamental changes that have significant implications for the management of Windows 10 and mobile devices.  For starters, the new release of Configuration Manager introduces a monthly release cycle for the product. Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president…

These days, the biggest roadblock for customers looking to adopt cloud services is the burden of unwinding past relationships with hardware. How do you walk into the office of the same CFO that signed off on your many CAPEX BOMs and tell him or her there’s better a way to consume apps and infrastructure via…

The recently published book, Navigating the Digital Age: The Definitive Cyber Resource Guide for Directors and Officers, is an interesting read. What it sometimes lacks in consistency, it makes up for in diversity of viewpoint. In one part of the book, an author may write that IT administrators need to focus more on border security,…

While there is no doubt a lot of publicity around E5, I find that it can still be confusing for customers to navigate. I'd like to take a few moments to cover some high points of E5 and how it can help transform your business. This is the first part of a blog series on…

You have aging hardware in your data center, failures are occurring more frequently and maintenance is eating up your time. Perhaps it is time to consider getting out of the hardware business and moving everything to Microsoft Azure.  Microsoft Azure data centers can provide you with highly available servers and storage, all without capital expenditures,…

On October 14, 2015, Cisco released Field Notice 64029 with updates on November 3, 2015. Here’s everything you need to know about this issue that affects Cisco UCS C220 M4 and C240 M4 servers. The field notice addresses and expands upon Cisco Bug CSCuv33991 [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="508"] Cisco publishes field notices to inform customers…

You’ve heard of Cisco Video Conferencing? Cisco WebEx? And Cisco TelePresence? Well we can now enjoy the combined experience of WebEx and TelePresence in the cloud. It’s called Cisco WebEx Collaboration Meeting Rooms Cloud, or “CMR Cloud” for short. A Deeper Look Take the WebEx experience you already know, add SIP URI access for Cisco…

I meet with many clients on a daily basis and consistently see the same challenges retail businesses face when it comes to their engagement strategy with their customers. Two of the biggest that stand out are often: Defining how to best connect with customers. In other words, how do my customers want to engage in…

Men and women around the world lose their jobs everyday due to budgetary cuts across all industries. As compassionate human beings, we all certainly wish that wouldn’t take place. The reality is, when it comes to IT professionals, there is, in fact, something that can be done to help prevent this. Too often, the heads…

IT chiefs are typically tasked with contributing to business productivity. This can often include adopting technologies from cloud computing and collaboration to mobility and apps like Office 365. But have you ever considered sound control to be a productivity builder – especially in today’s open-plan offices?  When open workplace plans began replacing cubicle farms in…

What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? Is it just another “marketecture” or something more meaningful to today’s data-driven organization? Well, according a report by McKinsey Global Institute, “Unlocking the Potential of the Internet of Things,” the Internet of Things is defined as the following: “Sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems. These…

IT leadership is all about decision making. While decisions about hardware and software are made routinely during the design phase of a project, data center decisions are made much less frequently.  The data center is a fixture of an organization. It’s a known value and the foundation from which IT services are delivered. If you…

Quality medical care depends heavily on effective communication. As a result, hospitals are under increasing pressure to implement more intelligent clinical communication solutions.  Factors driving an upgrade include: The desire for better clinical outcomes. Mobile-enabled clinical communications streamline workflows while giving care teams more accurate, complete and timely information. Teams thus become more responsive to…

Without being considered a full-fledged Apple “fanboy,” I am a longtime, loyal Mac user. I started typing this blog running Word 2016 for Mac on a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro while saving to OneDrive for Business. Later, while using mobile, I was using Safari connected to Word Online, CDW's Office 365 tenant. Furthermore, at a…

There is no doubt: The face of retail is changing. Retail success today means making a consistent connection with your customer regardless of how that customer decides to connect with you. Under an omnichannel strategy, a company’s store, website, mobile app and social media presence all have the same look and feel. The customer is…

When Microsoft announced the Surface 3 this past spring, I was intrigued. This is a device that is in the price ballpark of the Windows RT-based Surface 2, but has an Intel ATOM processor which allows it to run the full Windows 8 (and now Windows 10) operating systems. In a nutshell, it’s a small,…

While gestures, facial expressions and other visual feedback are vital to collaboration, none of these translate through teleconferencing methods. Video conferencing, on the other hand, enables the sort of effective dialogue that successful meetings require. The problem, however, is that managing video conferencing systems and endpoints is a complicated, time-consuming burden on IT staff. The…

It's a new Microsoft fiscal year and that means new Microsoft funding programs for customers. On July 1 of each year, many Microsoft customers are on the edge of their seats waiting to see what new program changes Microsoft will make, what the Microsoft vision is for the year and perhaps most importantly, how their…

In September 2015, I spoke at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference about what’s new and innovative in data center technology (My presentation can be downloaded here.). To prepare for this event, I started a two-part blog series. My first post highlighted how Nutanix is using commoditized server hardware and redefining its capability into…

The days of a simple dial tone are long gone. Companies are now enabled to leverage collaboration technology to address business goals like customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation and growth, among other things. Collaboration decisions have historically been led by IT, but that model has changed significantly with the demand of collaboration applications. Every company has…

Having attended both Cisco Live 2015 in June and the VMworld 2015 conference this past week, the message has been loud and clear: We at the cusp of a major transition. Data centers will look and function much differently in the next few years. As IT Professionals, the best career move we can make is…

While we have previously discussed Remote Expert Mobile design at a high level, let’s dig into the architecture/design of the Cisco Remote Expert Mobile. Cisco Remote Expert Mobile is a remote support software that empowers organizations to enable real-time engagement directly in their application and website channels, making it easy for customers to interact with…

Hospitals are aggressively embracing mobile technology and with good reason: Mobile applications enable doctors, nurses and staff to spend more time at the patient’s bedside. According to studies conducted by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, increased bedside presence has a positive impact on patient outcomes.  That sort of improvement in patient…

Every day we talk with customers about making decisions regarding what I.T. services to maintain on-premises and which ones to shift to the cloud. This can be a somewhat daunting task, but I.T. professionals want and expect services to help them manage the decisions, transitions and ongoing operations.  In addition, I.T. shops today see technology…

Most people I talk to don’t realize that there actually is an official definition of cloud computing or “the cloud.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology has created a definition that runs to several hundred words and essentially defines cloud as, “compute resources, delivered over a network.”  While this is an accurate definition, it…

At this month’s annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, corporate vice president John Case announced their new E5 Suite for Office 365, available to eligible partners and their customers by year end. The new E5 suite underscore Microsoft’s mobile first, cloud first strategy by adding features that enhance real-time, day-to-day business communications; improve data analysis and…

Contact centers are undergoing a major transformation. The customer experience has gone from being single channel predominately focused on voice to multichannel – and now omnichannel. Let’s focus on one solution within the multichannel scenario though: Remote Expert Mobile that was recently released by Cisco. Consumers are demanding rich interaction with the companies they want…

The IT industry is full of acronyms and buzzwords (as those of us in the profession are sometimes painfully aware.). Many of these are constantly evolving in definition (e.g., “the cloud”). There is also a never-ending supply of new technology and processes, all of which we struggle to define. As a result, we end up…

For those of us who wondered if Nutanix left any complexity in storage management, they continue to apply customer and partner feedback to simplify storage and compute environments.  For example, the App Mobility Fabric delivers VM placement, conversion and migration functionality. Effectively, a Nutanix user is enabled to automate VM conversions between Hyper-V, ESX and…

Serving as a classroom teacher, school administrator and chief technology officer over the course of 14 years, I’ve seen the emergence of classroom instruction combined with self-directed online study. Blended learning, as it is called, is gaining in popularity. In fact, recent statistics show that more than half of sixth- through 12th-grade students complete online…

There has been a lot written about Microsoft Azure from a technical perspective, but many of our customers still struggle with the essential question of, “What can I do with Azure?” Sure, many know that websites can be staged in Azure or that virtual machines can be deployed in Azure. Beyond that, most folks have…

From a clinical perspective, modern medicine often borders on the miraculous. From a business perspective, however, it’s another story. Hospitals, clinics and other medical practices are under tremendous pressure to be profitable despite escalating costs and downward pressure on pricing. Mandated by the Affordable Care Act, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program puts further financial pressure…

When it comes to trade show bucket lists, Cisco Live 2015 was the last of the majors that I’d yet to attend, so I was more than excited to finally cross it off. As a Solution Architect within the server storage practice, I was entrusted to work the CDW booth and handle inquiries around our…

CDW is on premise at Cisco Live. One of the biggest trends we are seeing is that users are clamoring for video collaboration and there’s a bit of “shadow IT” going on in some departments. Unfortunately, the experience is poor, systems aren’t working well together and you need a broad solution covering use cases including…

Courts face a variety of challenges, including tight budgets, an increasingly diverse population and, of course, the task of meting out fair, timely justice on a daily basis. Video conferencing can help with these challenges in several ways: Remote arraignment reduces transportation costs and avoids scheduling delays by letting courts conduct routine proceedings while a…

The real barrier to software defined networking (SDN) adoption is education. Network engineers have stated for the past 31 years that, “Real engineers manage via command-line interface (CLI),” as if it were a badge of honor to manage a network with thousands of lines of code on a black screen. With all of the benefits…

The first ever Microsoft Ignite conference is over. The expo hall is closed and the dust has begun to settle. With more than 20,000 attendees focusing across all major product lines, there was a lot to take in. I wanted to share a few points that stood out to me as points to consider in…

The enterprise network of the not-so-distant future promises to usher in a whole new era of modernization and efficiency. Wireless access has become the infrastructure force majeure, video traffic has allowed for more perceptive communication and underlying infrastructures have become more responsive and logical.  Today’s businesses must support and facilitate the efficient movement of increasing…

Over 14,000 people from 99 different countries traveled to the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nev. for EMC World 2015 held from May 4 through May 7. EMC World is a premier event for EMC, partners and customers, and is rife with announcements, keynote addresses, labs, product demonstrations and events.  Here are a few of my…

LTE-U is a technology standard more correctly referred to by its 3GPP name of License-Assisted Access (LAA). The standard provides a framework for implementing carrier grade LTE services in unlicensed RF spectrum frequently used by Wi-Fi products (among others).  Specifically, the goal is to operate in the currently available 5GHz spectrum now relied on solely by…

The HIMSS 2015 conference, noted as the largest health IT event in the industry, was held in Chicago on April 12-16. This year, I had the good fortune to both attend the conference and work in our healthcare booth. This was my fourth HIMSS, and, as usual, it was filled with good conversations, informative sessions…

It’s almost sad if you think about it: Here we are in 2015, yet most businesses still don’t have basic contact center screen pops. Countless customers still need to repeat themselves countless times, and countless agents still waste countless minutes.  But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Cisco Finesse desktop enables even small…

At CDW we solve a lot of collaboration technology problems for our customers. But we are also intense adopters ourselves. In fact, one of the reasons we are so good at addressing customers’ collaboration issues is that we have encountered many of them personally. And one of the reasons we’re so passionate about collaboration technology…

First came smartphones. Then it was tablets. Next could be wearables such as the Apple Watch. But regardless of what form devices may take in the future, the mobility phenomenon continues to grow relentlessly. And like a mob of unstoppable zombies on The Walking Dead, it’s threatening to eat IT alive. That’s because mobility is…

In our previous discussion on virtual networking, we explained how virtual networks are replacing the need for virtual local area network (VLAN) configuration in data centers, and simplifying the grouping and isolation of servers. But we never really explained how the virtual networks are actually accessed, since they “ride” underneath physical networks. So, let’s take…

There are SO many choices when it comes to video conferencing, and with choices come WORDS!  You might ask, “What do all these terms mean and how are they relevant to me?  I just want a video conferencing solution that works for my users and me!”  I’ve been asked so many times about this and…

My favorite aspect of being a wireless solution architect is how incredibly dynamic this space remains.  My second favorite part about working in wireless is the direct touch these technologies have with end users.  The only similar technology would be voice, but everyone already takes voice services for granted.  Luckily, for me, we’re not quite…

What Is It? You may have been hearing the buzz around Microsoft’s pending product launch for “Skype for Business,” but what exactly is it? Simply put, Skype for Business is the next generation of Microsoft’s unified communications platform. Make no mistake, this is not a first-generation product. Skype for Business Server 2015 will be the…

For a long time data center architects have struggled with the requirement to provide connectivity across racks of servers, across multiple locations, while maintaining isolation for groups of those servers.  For example, the Accounting department might not want their servers accessible to someone working on another department’s server.  The Accounting servers need to be isolated,…

When Cisco was founded in 1984, applications like WordPerfect were simple and IP was used as the transport protocol to move data through the network.  Fast-forward 31 years where applications today are quite complex and multi-tiered.  For example, a user may connect to a web portal on one server, which then performs a search on…

What’s next for Microsoft’s industry leading business productivity software Office 365?  NextGen Portals are dynamic and social intranet sites that bring machine learning and content curation together, increasing document relevancy and personalization, while decreasing the potential for stale content experiences. NextGen Portals take cues from past customer custom portals built on SharePoint and land squarely…

Yes, the hourglass is getting emptier by the day.  While we deal with thousands of customers across public and private sectors, representing every organizational category you can imagine, one theme remains constant:  No one seems concerned about the impact of July 14, 2015 on their organization. For some organizations, the end of life – and…

Being productive requires simple, effective and secure ways to collaborate. Email is no longer an effective way to share documents. Within email, every document attached is an unnecessary copy; therefore, it’s impossible to effectively track changes.  For those on the receiving end, emailed documents lack appropriate methods of contributing and make it difficult later to…

Benjamin Franklin’s famous axiom is as true today, regarding data loss prevention (DLP), as it was when Franklin first made the quote.  While Franklin was actually addressing “fire safety,” data loss incidents today can cause organizations, both large and small, to “get burned.” Many IT chiefs are spending a vast majority of their precious budgets…

There’s a problem with the technology that we’ve come to know as “cloud.”  The cloud is not what you think it is.  You see, every computer user assigns a definition to the technology they use and it doesn’t even have to be accurate.  It’s WHAT IT IS…to the user.  This can lead to confusion and…

Hospitals no longer have the characterization of being dark, decrepit, scary places where you put off going – yes, even for that annual wellness exam.  In fact, some healthcare entities and hospitals are more like hotels, competing for patients, doctors and the reputation of being the Ritz-Carlton of infirmaries. There is no question that health…

Microsoft Office 365 offers a substantially different — and far superior — way of optimizing knowledge worker productivity. But because accessing productivity software from the cloud is so different from running it locally, many IT decision-makers approach the move to Office 365 as a major enterprise technology migration. As a result, they often defer implementation…

Despite overwhelming evidence that video-enabled collaboration improves productivity and yields better business outcomes, adoption of desktop video conferencing has lagged. Lukewarm user response impeded adoption of previous generations of desktop video technology. This lack of reception stemmed in part from problems with the end-user experience and the fact that most users weren’t accustomed to having…

In most sales-oriented businesses, especially financial, it is commonly known that 80% of the business comes from 20% of the customers, using about 20% of your resources. This means that 80% of your customers, still using 80% of your resources, provide only 20% of your business. In this day and age of customers leaving for…

There are many reasons why companies defer decisions about collaboration technology. Confronted with an array of technology choices, IT managers may be confused. Competing vendors make a lot of similar claims, making it difficult to arrive at a buying decision with an appropriate degree of confidence. Some IT managers also struggle to define a business…

Providing the ultimate fan experience is one of the goals at the 2015 Super Bowl. And Wi-Fi is no exception. CDW has been working with the Arizona Cardinals this football season to make sure that the University of Phoenix Stadium is ready for Sunday’s Big Game. The work started last summer when we designed and…

The smell of potato chips and a few too many energy drinks wafts through the air. Dawn is still hours away. The dark room surrounds Joe as he smiles in the dim light of the laptop screen. His persistence has finally paid off. He has been dissecting this component for a while. Server 2003 is…

Almost every collaboration project I have seen in my career starts, progresses and ends the same way.  We have a vision; we plan; we create committees; we start small and build toward our goal. We align the people, assign a project manager, install the software and build out a basic taxonomy. Perhaps, we even think…

My father is the type of person who holds onto cars until he squeezes every last bit of value out of them.  I remember spending weekend evenings holding the light while he worked under the hood fixing something on his old Pontiac.  Often, he would spend entire weekends tearing apart a carburetor and sometimes hundreds…

In mid-November, Microsoft announced that it would be rebranding the next version of its unified communications platform as Skype for Business.  This represents the next step in the integration between Skype, one of the most popular consumer communications services (with more than 300 million users) and Lync, one of the leading enterprise communications platforms (sharing…

Everyone has at least one pair of outstanding jeans. Women’s love for a great pair of blue jeans can sometimes even top having a pint of Häagen-Dazs. Men feel the same way, but as the first rule of Fight Club states, “We don’t talk or ask questions about it.” Nothing is like pulling on that…

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an amazing panel interview sponsored by CDW in partnership with Riverbed, produced by CIO magazine and held at the Foreign Cinema in the Mission District of San Francisco. There were 26 very bright attendees from various levels of information technology. The focus of the event was WAN…

I have spent a lot of time talking to customers and analysts about Cloud solutions and the value they bring to the market.  As a result, I have seen countless instances where customers have achieved great success with their Cloud initiatives.  Unfortunately, I have seen far more examples where organizations have walked away from spectacular…

When’s the last time you checked your voicemail?  Your email?  Your texts?  In an era of always-on-the-go dispersed teams working together, Collaboration tools always seem to slightly lag the ideal point of “frictionless” experience.  Today Cisco announces a first version of their newest Collaboration tool: Cisco Project Squared.  And with it, the tools are once…

Video collaboration is getting to be a critical piece of any enterprise’s collaboration strategy. When more than two parties need to be in a meeting, the need for a video bridge becomes necessary. In the past, this needed on-premises resources that were expensive and required capital expenditure. While this is still a viable option when…

Companies throughout the world have been very busy for the past couple of years upgrading their Windows XP systems before the end of extended support earlier this year. While many began to breathe a sigh of relief when that project wrapped up (and others are continuing to work through it), there really isn’t time to…

Many enterprises are happily running their Office desktop apps or Exchange, SharePoint, Yammer and Lync services online through Office 365 subscriptions. Some now are asking what other workloads they might move to the cloud. Microsoft Azure answers that need and complements Office 365 through its platform and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. What is…

I’ve seen plenty of change throughout my career.  The first big wave was IP telephony, then a large security wave, next up was wireless and then security again. Now, we are on to the data center.  I have learned that the more we change the better we become, and the more our users rely upon…

By now everyone knows that Windows Server 2003 is fast approaching end of life. But each organization needs to assess the impact, both in terms of the risks of not removing Windows Server 2003 from the infrastructure, and the rewards of deploying a current server OS in the data center. In this brief blog post,…

Just for this blog post you can call me John.  I'm a hardware lover, Lord King of IT Infrastructure for my company.  When I hug it, I do get reciprocal love right back – from the storage frames to the blade servers. I'm the "as-a-Service" machine for my company behind our firewalls.  I've watched a…

With all of the recent excitement about the “Shellshock” code execution vulnerability in the UNIX bash shell, and the somewhat older news about SSL vulnerabilities, I am reminded once again about the need for organizations to formally manage information security as part of an ongoing process. This should come as no surprise.  However, sometimes we…

Indulge me with a trip down memory lane.  Let’s go back to 2003.  What a great year. Apple introduced iTunes, American Idol debuted on television and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl.  In addition, Wikipedia was launched, the idea of Myspace (remember that) was born on a whiteboard and Mark Zuckerberg (creator of…

Today Microsoft held an event in San Francisco announcing the next version of Windows. There were a lot of rumors going into the event regarding the name and pricing. Some of those were answered, some were not, but there were definitely a few surprises. The event featured Terry Myerson, Microsoft executive vice president of operating…

The big security news last week was Shellshock, a vulnerability that affects the Bash shell on *nix operating systems (including Macs). So good news, Windows admins, you get to sit this one out. For the rest of the world, the impact of Shellshock is still unclear and perhaps that's what is making it most unsettling.…

Office 365 introduces a drastically new way of managing your Microsoft Applications. In many ways, this is a positive change allowing you to gain insight into and control over the software deployed in your environment. However, if this is your first Microsoft Office 365 Subscription, the activation process can be somewhat confusing. Here we will…

Organizations subscribe to Microsoft Office 365; they synchronize their Active Directory and enable single sign-on (SSO). What they do not know is that they now have a bunch of capabilities available to them, many of them free, from their Microsoft Azure tenant. Yes, you heard correctly, their Azure tenant. But, wait a minute Pat; you…

Predictive analytics, otherwise known as data mining or advanced analytics, has become an area of increased interest in many industries. Predictive analytics leverages existing data sets and statistical algorithms to create models that predict future outcomes. With the advent of Big Data, large data sets combined with predictive analytics have led to jaw-dropping results. To…

Today marks the beginning of the next wave of innovation for the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). They are always innovating in this space and once again have stepped up! The new announcements around UCS provides a broader and more powerful portfolio of technologies. They will allow customers to power applications at every scale and add intelligence…

During my senior year in college (unfortunately many moons ago), I recall an instance where I was furiously trying to finish my senior design lab project with my teammates. Somewhat delirious from lack of sleep and too much caffeine, we were finishing the final pieces of our 200-page proposal and thesis together when the unthinkable…

The date was June 5th, 1895 and Jedidiah Collinsworth, CFO for General Corporation was having a very perplexing day.  General Corporation was the largest maker of hammers in its time.  However, the greatest cost to the business was generating power onsite via company owned generators.  Every month the bills would stack up to the ceiling…

Based on our recent survey of cloud decision makers, security/privacy continues to be the top factor on their influence to allocate compute and storage workloads between on-premise servers, co-location/third-party hosting or public/hybrid clouds. I’ve been working closely with an industry thought leader on cloud security, Mark Nunnikhoven from Trend Micro, and would like to share some…

We are in the middle of security conference season. Therefore, it’s not entirely unexpected to see headlines from Black Hat and other conferences discussing “grave” security threats, and what they mean to our ability to protect our organizations and ourselves. Arguably, the biggest headline of the past few weeks has been the purported discovery of…

I recently took part in a small executive dinner panel to provide an integrator’s perspective on the topic of application optimization. This event was produced by IDG/CIO magazine and moderated by one of its editors. CDW hosted the event in partnership with F5 Networks, who also had a subject matter expert on the panel along…

Good risk assessments tend to include at least three distinct assessment components of varying complexity, followed by a good reporting system with internal and external checks and balances. While specifically designed for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), this general methodology could be used for any assessment project with a compliance component. For…

Software is what’s required to make the train run on time and keep the lights on, or perhaps a little more tangibly stated, software is what some IT guy writes to produce those reports that management expects at the end of every month. Software is everywhere and it's a lot of things, but in accounting…

For a long time, security concerns have hindered cloud computing implementation among healthcare organizations. The fact that this is changing is not unheard of if you consider that when the stethoscope was first invented in 1816, doctors originally thought it too cumbersome to use. By 1850, stethoscopes were widely used among most doctors. In fact,…

What are the top nine reasons to employ Office 365 in your business? First, what is Office 365?    Office 365 is a subscription-based online suite of software products that improve business productivity.  The most popular components under the Office 365 brand are Exchange Online (email) and Office 365 ProPlus, the familiar desktop application products used…

It's been an amazing day at Cloud & Such - no bothersome customer calls and the power has only gone out twice in the data center (aka parents’ garage). However, the propane-powered generator kicked in both times. Game of Thrones plays on the large screen monitor that doubles as a computer display. Walking outside the…

Is there any way to get the candidate in over telepresence before the VP of Finance leaves for Hong Kong later today?  Well, you know that the quality of Skype is just not up to snuff and FaceTime on an iPad, in front of a panel of six, just won’t go well.  What’s a good…

The Cisco TelePresence SX10 Quick Set is an all-in-one unit that combines with any flat panel display to video-enable small collaboration spaces. It offers affordability for small-to-medium-sized organizations just starting out with telepresence, or in extending telepresence throughout an enterprise. TL;DR Version You can equip a four-to-eight person conference room with a Cisco SX10 and…

In a previous blog post, I mentioned that the measure of success with a cloud provider comes down to your ability to get the “real story” during the sales cycle.  While I touched on the physical security of the provider’s data center - what about the logical, remote and application data security in the cloud…

The routing protocol Location ID Separation Protocol or LISP is a feature rich protocol that is continually evolving and has many business use cases. I’ll be discussing LISP mobility in more detail in future blog post. I’m focusing on three business use cases here: (1) Efficient Multi-Homing (2) IPv6 Enablement (3) Multi-Tenancy and Large-Scale VPNs…

It’s everywhere around you – is cloud computing a friend or foe?  Does the name make you nauseous? Career maker or career ender?  As a Cloud Client Executive (CCE) at CDW, I hear it all from customers about cloud, so humorous, in fact, it could green-light an HBO comedy series. My role is to help…

“Don, please schedule an emergency meeting with all IT and telecom staff. We had a flood in the first floor of building C at the Washington Drive campus. We need to figure out how to provide sales, marketing and accounting with immediate access to our customers as the phones on that floor aren’t working now.…

EMC World, EMC’s premier technology conference, was held May 5 thru May 8, 2014, at the Venetian conference center in Las Vegas. Numerous keynote addresses, breakout sessions, virtual labs, announcements and demonstrations was a lot to take in over the course of four days, and even more to fit into a single blog post. Therefore,…

I think we’ve all heard it. The constant drum beating, unending buzzwords and constant hype surrounding cloud computing. In some ways, we are in danger of having the din obscure the full extent of the business makeover the cloud has to offer. For a long time, there was the misconception that the cloud would solve…

As a Solution Architect for CDW Microsoft Services I am often asked “How secure is Microsoft Office 365?” I have also heard concerns of downtime, data not being secure and more. What we rarely hear is how a large number of customers are satisfied with Office 365. In this article, I look to discredit some…

Today’s business drivers are demanding continuous application availability for not only office staff but also the growing  telecommute community. To meet these challenges, we are seeing more  IT chiefs moving away from a primary data center and backup  disaster recovery (DR) data center to an active-active data center architecture. The active-active data center has  the…

The recently publicized "Heartbleed" SSL/TLS bug has received a tremendous amount of media coverage and, deservedly, a significant amount of concern amongst the IT security community. Rather than rehash the same information that has been shared repeatedly, I would like to offer some philosophical commentary, concise guidance, and additional resources to the IT community as…

There has been a fair amount of confusion and misinformation surrounding authentication for Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365. The intent of this post is to help get us all on the same page on this issue, especially when it comes deploying solutions for authentication to cloud services. Let me set the stage. An…

One of the great things about being on the security assessment team is the ability to work with companies to truly improve their overall security posture. Sure, it’s interesting to talk about zero-days and exotic exploits against systems they don’t have, but in most cases, it doesn’t hold particular relevance. Part of our assessment exercise…

Keeping pace with shifting marketplace conditions, exploding volumes of complex data and ever-more pressing compliance mandates is stretching capital markets firms’ IT infrastructures and budgets to the max. But cloud computing can offer an assist. Discover how investing in the right Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud solution can help capital markets firms efficiently and…

How productive can you really be with a tablet instead of a full laptop? Can you get real work done? Or will the tablet limit you to second rate or less productive work? I decided to put those questions to the test during a recent day trip to Chicago. The experiment was to see if…

…Synchronize live video feeds and content from the Jumbotron to digital displays, all the way down to each mobile device. …Allow fans to follow comments from friends, post event pictures and learn more from sports commentators on Facebook and Twitter - in real time. …Make commercial breaks a time to call up a player’s stats…

In this video CDW Engineers unbox a Google Chromebox for meetings testing unit and review components and basic setup. In this video CDW Engineers take you on a tour of the “ad-hoc” meeting flow – starting a hangout from Chromebox for meetings and joining a few users for a meeting. In this video CDW Engineers…

Healthcare IT (HIT) Security is garnering greater attention among healthcare organizations, though most HIT execs indicate they are not fully prepared. In fact, a recent report by the SANS Institute indicates that healthcare organizations are being compromised at an “alarming” frequency. Given the hefty average cost of an incident coming in at a whopping $800,000,…

In recent months during many meetings with clients of all sizes I have seen a huge surge in curiosity and consideration for Google Apps for Business from organizations looking to bring a consumer centric user experience into their business workspace strategy to reignite their communication and collaboration capabilities by adopting Google’s feature rich mobile and social…

HIMSS 2014 is in the books. It was a massive event with over 38,000 attendees learning from their peers about leveraging health IT (HIT) to improve patient outcomes, lower the cost of care and increase patient satisfaction. At the overall conference, it was impossible to escape the prominent themes including: Analytics Security Mobility Patient Engagement…

Has your organization succumbed (or hopefully embraced) the move to mobility? Have they gone as far as to support a bring your own device orBYOD initiative, allowing staffers to use their personal smartphone or tablet for work purposes? How has the support through the entire process been? Being on the IT side, you might have…

Attending the 2014 Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) Conference & Exposition in Austin got me thinking about my own schooling. There was no such thing as a cellular phone, tablet or ’phablet,’ much less anything that could be considered a smart device – other than a teacher and an overhead transparency and book projector. Today,…

If you have been paying attention over the last year or so you have probably noticed wearable technology popping up all over the place. It seems like everyone is wearing some form of fitness tracker these days. While the purpose of a fitness tracker is rather clear, the same cannot easily be said of other…

People love Google+ Hangouts for meetings. People also love big LCD screens in conference rooms for meetings. What if they both moved to California and got married? We’re in luck – today Google announced “Chromebox for meetings” – their first foray into the world of room-based video conferencing, with CDW as a launch partner. As you might…

The marketing hype around cloud computing is at an all-time high. That only makes sense as there have never before been so many options to source IT in an operating expense (OPEX) delivery model. Many businesses are trying to answer the question, ”What do we do with cloud and what does it mean to our…

A few years ago I remember having a conversation with some of my peers about emerging trends and the concept of Enterprise Social came up. Since then we have collectively followed this trend waiting for the right moment we all knew would eventually come to light. Finally it appears the time has come. Enterprise Social…

Most of the customers I speak with agree that having a Software Asset Management (SAM) plan is a REALLY GOOD IDEA. A significant number of them then tell me that they can't afford the project. My question back to them is: ”How can you afford NOT to have a SAM strategy?" Consider this: the risks…

With the prevalence of mobile devices today, the need for faster Wi-Fi has and continues to become more important. 802.11ac promises faster, more efficient wireless communications, but there are a few important things to remember. (The 802.11ac protocol is being delivered in two waves. Wave 1 of 802.11ac is discussed here.) There are many factors…

The recently updated Cisco WebEx for iPad app with new Box integration brings together two very powerful collaboration platforms from Cisco and Box. In fact, it delivers one of the most efficient and productive mobile collaboration experiences in the market. Tapping into open APIs on both sides, the new WebEx and Box integration enables mobile…

Fancy tag lines aside, we have come to an age of data storage like no other in the history of information retrieval. The amount of unstructured data being created on an hourly basis is mind-boggling. This includes video, photos, documents – you name it. Both consumers and businesses alike create terabytes of data and need…

According to Gartner, by 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today. Some of the leading benefits of social software include: Improving collaboration by opening communications and sharing of content, resources and activities, bringing geographically…

Today’s workplace consists of an always-on, 24x7 workforce connected globally through the Internet. The new virtual workplace is powered by collaboration tools, mobile devices and cloud-based services. Implementing every new mobile device or collaboration solution can tax already stretched IT departments. Still, they realize that ultimately these tools help support their organization. When making changes…

With the release of SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Online became an attractive collaboration platform for many organizations. Not only does the option of a hosted solution minimize infrastructure planning to simplify the deployment process, the latest SharePoint Platform also introduces a myriad of additional benefits that lead to increased user adoption and productivity whether deployed On…

I’m hearing more and more conversations on extending Layer 2 domains between data centers. While this sounds easy, if done incorrectly this could cause devices to fail (firewalls and load balancers) and asymmetrical routing problems in your enterprise. To avoid these problems you must understand how your customers communicate to the data center. Extending Layer…

89%, 80%, 77% and 97% are some really exciting numbers that HP wants you to know about. What do they correspond to? 89% less energy, 80% less space, 77% less cost and 97% less complex. These were the goals that HP set for itself when it began the Moonshot project in 2011. In April of…

Mobility trends are fascinating to watch, especially in the healthcare industry. There’s no doubt that the proliferation of mobile devices is driving many changes. Clinicians are increasingly using mobile devices, and the number of applications is exploding. The Association of American Medical Colleges reported that in 2012 there were over 40,000 healthcare apps available, with…

Cloud computing is not for everybody, but it is certainly something everybody should get educated on, as it is completely changing the way businesses operate. It is revolutionizing the way IT departments function. No longer is an IT department just an IT department, they are a business group, similar to a sales team, marketing, finance,…

Its hard to imagine that in 2004, in San Diego, 1600 brave attendees took their first steps into what would soon become one of the most anticipated events in the IT industry – VMworld. This year that number will increase to more than 20,000 people attending the 10th VMworld conference with a chance to attend…

My People are Running 120MPH Just Keeping the Lights On One of the big reasons I hear from most IT Directors when asked why they aren't adopting new technology is that they just don't have the people to start investigating those new technologies. Many teams are already overburdened with their current workload and can't afford…

On his “Life as a Healthcare CIO” blog, Dr. John Halamka, the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center talks about the market pressures that are leading many healthcare organizations to look to merge or acquire with other providers. Many healthcare organizations are discovering that accountable care reimbursed via global capitated risk contracts requires more…

We’ve been waiting patiently for Cisco ISE 1.2 to be released, and it’s finally here! This is a major ISE update from Cisco and there are a significant changes within this release that you’re going to want to know about. Let’s discuss a few. New Simplified Upgrade Process Prior to ISE 1.2, upgrading ISE 1.1…

Take a first look at the new technology on display at Cisco Live from Sachine Gupta of Cisco and my coworker Nacho Vega. In this video you'll see some of the latest networking solutions introduced at Cisco Live 2013 and what makes these products so essential to your networking needs. For more information on Cisco…

Through a partnership with Google and Esna Technologies, CDW has rolled out native access to the CDW Cloud Collaboration suite within Google Apps. In the above video, my coworker Andy Dignan, Esna Technologies' David Ballins, and I talk about the new app integration at Cisco Live 2013. Watch and see why clients are evaluating moving…