Cloud

It’s no secret that software and applications drive business today — and the future is only going to be more app-driven. So, it’s imperative for businesses of all shapes, sizes and industries, whether cloud newbies or cloud natives, to be thinking strategically about how to develop their software. And to do that, business leaders need to be thinking about DevOps.

Yes, DevOps is a buzzword, but that doesn’t detract from its growing importance for business. To help our customers understand what DevOps is, we started a podcast, Simplifying DevOps.

2020 is over. And while it was an unprecedented year, the As a Service companies like Five9 helped make the widespread adoption of remote work a reality. For more As a Service information, check out my other blog series.

It takes a catastrophic event to stress test a system. Last year was just that event, as we saw massive amounts of internet traffic, cloud services up and down and sometimes degraded. Through it all, Five9 continued to function and moved forward with mergers and acquisitions.

Within CDW’s AWS practice, we maintain a number of AWS accounts for managing our day-to-day business activities. One of the accounts is the “Sandbox Training” account that provides an environment for our CDW coworkers to learn and experiment with a multitude AWS services.

Periodically, we go to the account and try to understand the cost and resource usage pattern within the account. Recently I found out that there were many snapshots created by AWS Backups in our training account. Most likely, the vault was created as a part of the training and learning exercise. The AWS Backup policy was created to back up a few EBS volumes every night. Due to an oversight, the user forgot to delete the backup policy after the experimentation was over.

As organizations adopt microservices and cloud-native design to support software development, they’re starting to hear a more frequent request bubbling up from their developers: a desire to work in containers, rather than virtual machines (VMs).

For now, the container space continues to be in flux, particularly as virtualization and cloud vendors work to meet the expanding demand. But a growing number of organizations are incorporating the use of containers into their environments, even those that haven’t traditionally been consumers of this type of technology.

Containers may not be the right move right now for your organization, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them, because that could change in the near future. First, let’s look at the major differences between VMs and containers.

City leaders may know they need a smart city strategy to attract and grow business, and to connect and serve citizens. But often, achieving the desired outcomes is harder than it sounds. These initiatives vary widely, with some struggling to get off the ground, while others achieve significant successes, such as aligning disparate, siloed systems.

To help establish the kind of success that drives further investment, I often suggest focusing on the development of the smart city “nervous system” platforms — the place where humans and data intersect for the purpose of better decision-making.

I work with companies of all sizes across a variety of industries on their Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) initiatives. There are almost as many different reasons for making the move to a cloud contact center as there are organizations using them. One might want to redeploy internal IT staff to more business-focused strategic projects. Another might be following internal policies to seek out cloud solutions where viable. Still another might be under the (often mistaken) impression that CCaaS will result in instant cost savings.

However, several reasons come up in our conversations time and again. Here are the top factors driving organizations’ CCaaS deployments.