Judging from search engine traffic — and from the calls I receive — there’s some confusion out there about hybrid cloud and multicloud. In truth, both are completely viable models, with various organizations relying on each to achieve significant business benefits. But before IT and business leaders can decide which approach makes the most sense for them, they need to step back and ask themselves what outcomes they are trying to achieve.

Driving greater automation is a process that underlies most every project in the data center. It’s an important business differentiator that can help determine an organization’s success. And like all good things, there are lots of problems that gum it up. Having greater awareness of some of these roadblocks will help you see and address them sooner.

Three of the most common problems you’ll encounter are: long system uptime, manual restarts and dated processes. This post will help you address them and strengthen your automation efforts.

The pace of change in IT is only accelerating, with many industry observers predicting that we’ll see the same amount of change over the next two to five years as we did in the past 10 or 15.

We’re already moving toward a world where data centers are able to handle 100,000 or more microservices, each created and ended on demand, in real time. But to get there, organizations will need to undertake another round of IT modernization. Here are some of the capabilities that organizations should consider as they get started.

Cisco has been hard at work to deliver features and enhancements to the Webex Calling product portfolio. Here are the biggest and best announcements from Cisco’s recent Connect Cloud Calling Summit that make Webex Calling a more appealing and complete communications service in the cloud.

Hybrid cloud is often seen as a “best of both worlds” approach, giving businesses the scalability and agility of the public cloud while also allowing them to host some workloads in their own data centers for cost, security or other reasons. But managing the complexity introduced by a hybrid cloud requires specific skills, many of which employees might lack. Consider taking the following steps to ensure that you have the expertise needed to support a hybrid cloud approach.

As a CDW field solution architect, I work with organizations across numerous industries as they grapple with the complexity of securing cloud computing environments. These environments range from full-scale public cloud deployments to internal private clouds, along with varying degrees of hybrid cloud. But whatever the technology, the security issues remain constant. We work with them to protect their data, applications and infrastructure against a wide range of threats.

Here are some key steps that you can take to secure your own cloud computing deployments.