Cloud

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.

We still don’t know when or how the COVID-19 pandemic will end, but one thing seems certain: The workplace is unlikely to ever look the same.

While it has become clear that most businesses will maintain physical office spaces, the majority of employers say they will give their employees some choice over where they want to work once the pandemic is over. The likely result? A hybrid workforce made up of employees who split their time between home and the office, depending on their roles and their to-do lists on any given workday.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platforms are uniquely suited to support such an arrangement, offering the following benefits:

The public cloud offers significant benefits of flexibility and scalability. But it also comes with challenges — especially with regard to security. CDW’s complimentary Cloud Security Posture Assessment is designed to help organizations in this area.

If your organization finds itself dealing with security and compliance challenges in the cloud, here are some key reasons why you might consider engaging us to conduct a CSPA.

Organizations find numerous advantages to running workloads in the cloud, but managing the subscription billing isn’t generally one of them. As CDW works with organizations to manage their cloud services, we have learned that the work required to decipher invoices, ferret out efficiencies and otherwise manage these environments can be considerable.

That’s why we invite organizations to simplify their subscriptions — and take advantage of our complementary managed services support — by moving them from Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EAs) to Azure from CDW. The entire process takes about two weeks, start to finish, and requires no downtime.

CDW has been a Gold-level Microsoft partner for more than a decade, and last year, we were proud to become an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider. That designation reflects the exceptional engineering and technical support that we provide as a valuable partner for our customers.

It can be frustrating when you ask if an IT system is safe, and your expert resource responds, “It depends,” followed by a quip that the only secure system is one that’s powered off. Not so helpful.

Most IT teams are proficient in working with one cloud service provider (CSP) or on one facet of cloud computing, but increasingly, they are being asked to manage multiple cloud environments. The shift is substantial, especially because when it comes to security, the devil is in the details.

We know that risks are involved with multicloud Infrastructure as a Service implementations. It’s critical to know what they are and how to manage them. Let’s start by examining how we got here, and why there’s no turning back now.

As many organizations shift elements of their IT infrastructures to the public cloud, they must be aware of the new risks this move carries. Often, organizations make the false assumption that, in outsourcing the ownership of hardware and data center operations, they have also outsourced security to the cloud service provider.

While this is partially true because the organization is no longer required to deal with physical and infrastructure security, stakeholders are still responsible for compliance, data security, application security and possibly platform security if they are managing their own virtual machines or containers. A CSP’s documentation of the shared responsibility model will explain in more detail where it delineates responsibility.