Cloud

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

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

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

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

Containers can help organizations achieve their business objectives quickly and efficiently. These software instances package up code and all its dependencies to enable applications to run quickly and reliably among multiple computing environments. This portability makes containers a great fit for microservices and other modern methodologies that support DevOps development processes.

When the pandemic hit, organizations with agile development frameworks such as DevOps had an advantage over competitors that didn’t: The speed and agility that DevOps provides in creating new applications let them quickly adapt to changing conditions. Those that weren’t able to employ DevOps had to develop new capabilities using less agile development processes, which generally take much longer. The success that organizations had with DevOps and containers helped solidify them as essential elements of an agile development mindset.

Using DevOps processes, a monolithic application that used to take three years to build can be broken down into a number of small applications, each of which can be developed much more quickly and easily. Features are developed and bugs are addressed rapidly, and new iterations of software are produced continuously.

The network edge has evolved drastically in recent years. The pandemic, of course, fast-forwarded everyone’s plans for moving distributed services out to the cloud. As a result, the edge has exploded, and it’s no longer the traditional perimeter of campus and data center networks. The new edge is wherever devices are.

Physical security concerns are a top priority for executives, and video surveillance technologies play a crucial role in meeting safety and security requirements. In my work with CDW customers, I’ve witnessed a significant shift in recent years as organizations realize that video surveillance is a technology solution and shift responsibility for maintaining video surveillance systems from facilities teams to IT staff. In fact, a recent survey indicates that about half of CDW’s customers have already completed this transition, and others are preparing to hand over responsibility to technology teams.

As IT departments take over these solutions, they want to apply long-standing IT best practices to help them manage video surveillance efficiently and effectively. IT professionals often find themselves inheriting video surveillance systems that use different products at different facilities and may still rely on outdated technologies. To address the limitations of these systems, many organizations are engaging in efforts to modernize, standardize and automate video surveillance.

IT governance is not cloud governance.

Every company that ventures into the cloud ultimately crosses into the blurred world of governance. IT governance encompasses a range of functions and knowledge and, in its own right, takes skill to balance needs versus productivity. With the addition of cloud technologies, organizations can expect a lot more knobs and dials that, in the end, form a complex attack surface if implemented incorrectly.