Eric Ludwig

When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect in May, the new mandate affected organizations far beyond the boundaries of the EU. GDPR’s requirements that organizations protect the privacy of any personal data they handle apply to the personal information of EU residents wherever it may exist in the world. This means…

The debate over cloud consumption is settled. Ninety-five percent of enterprises and small/medium businesses are using some type of cloud, according to RightScale’s 2016 State of the Cloud Report. But that’s not where the discussion ends. When customers are looking to take an application to the cloud there are many considerations. One of the first…

It seems everyone is offering “cloud” solutions these days. In fact, a recent Google search of “cloud solutions” revealed 85 million hits! If we dial that down further to a search for “Unified Communications as a Service” (UCaaS), we get only 14 million hits. How do we choose? Are all UCaaS solutions equal? Where do…

Most IT leaders are looking for the next angle or the do-more-with-less approach to spending money. Telecom services are one of the larger operational expenses on a company’s balance sheet. Customers have been looking for ways to creatively add bandwidth and cut costs. The market has responded, albeit slowly. Back around the year 2000, some…

Of the over 1,200 IT professionals surveyed in the CDW Cloud 401 Report, 100 percent of the respondents report that cloud computing services have been implemented as part of their IT strategy. And of their total IT services, 35 percent of those are delivered completely or partially by the cloud, with 54 percent being migrated from…

Many people believe hosted voice and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) are the same thing. I suppose you could argue they’re similar, and certainly Hosted Voice is a component of UCaaS since you can’t have UCaaS without a dial tone. However, I think there are several differences. When considering moving away from an on-premises…

Gone are the days when a customer calls a company or writes to complain.  They still write, but no longer to the CEO or some other board member of the organization.  They write to social media. Customers still have complaints, like they always have. But their methods and how companies communicate back have changed significantly. …

One of the most apparent holes in many organizations is not having a proper disaster recovery (DR) plan. In fact, a recent study by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council highlighted these findings, noting that about three quarters of enterprises do not have proper procedures in place to survive an emergency. While disaster recovery planning…

Disaster Recovery (DR) is one of the hottest topics concerning cloud computing these days. With the recent large scale disasters, both natural in the Northeast as well as man-made in Texas, disaster recovery is becoming more than just a proverbial checkmark in the box. IT organizations are tasked with providing a true disaster preparedness strategy…

Cloud computing is currently the hot topic in IT. At the same time, cloud computing has become one of the most nebulous terms in IT. Even definitions in the cloud space are different from “expert” to “expert.” Consider the cloud computing definitions below from highly credible sources: Gartner: Cloud computing is a style of computing…