As a CDW Cloud Specialist, it’s my job to help our customers select the best cloud provider based on their requirements and goals. Typically, customers come into my initial consultations with preconceived notions of ideal providers, but often these are based off of effective marketing and advertising strategies employed by the cloud companies with the…

Imagine you’re a radiology patient. Something hurts and needs to be fixed. An X-ray informs the diagnosis which informs a treatment plan. Let’s apply the same diagnostic approach to shadow IT!

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…

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.

In the world of IT, individuals often define a disaster as a hurricane, tornado, flood or earthquake. The truth is that a disaster is any event that prevents your business from accessing data and systems required to operate, including regional power outages, cyber attacks, employee sabotage and hardware failure. Disaster recovery (DR) solutions used to…

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…

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to take advantage of the cloud for disaster recovery (DR) and the key areas on which to focus. Taking advantage of the cloud for DR solutions can reduce business continuity expenses and provide a way to ensure that key services are operational in the event an…

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.”

This isn’t a new TV show — it’s a rerun. Delivering IT services over a network is not new, nor is combining computing power to serve clients. It’s just being done better: it’s more economical, secure and manageable than ever before via cloud Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cisco UCS Director was designed with a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, such as the self-service portal. While that portal can do a lot, there are ways it can be extended to provide more support that will facilitate a larger user base and set of use cases. This article will demonstrate how to use tags within…