Cloud

Before this spring, many organizations were already set up to accommodate some portion of their employees working remotely. But very few businesses were equipped to handle all of their employees working from home. As a result, many employees saw performance problems and reduced functionality in the very applications they relied on to do their jobs.

It’s been said that we’re living through what is effectively the world’s largest business continuity exercise. Here are three lessons that business and IT leaders should take away from it.

Governance can be an overwhelming undertaking. For the organization, it can be viewed as stifling innovation; for the IT department, it is viewed as necessary to prevent out of control resources causing havoc in billing and security. These two divergent cultures must figure out a way to implement a solid governance structure for the cloud while still allowing developers and business the innovation the cloud promises. Microsoft has a solution to help bridge this conflict.

Organizations have a number of compelling reasons to reduce complexity in their cloud environments, including lower costs, improved security and optimized performance, to name a few. One other benefit of highly efficient cloud environments often gets overlooked, but is a major consideration right now: business continuity. In a way, the COVID-19 crisis is the world’s largest business continuity exercise. We’re seeing right now, in very real terms, how organizations’ IT environments hold up to previously unimaginable challenges.

With demand for businesses to consume collaboration services in the cloud at an all-time high right now, CDW has added the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) solution to its Managed Collaboration Anywhere (MCA) portfolio. This portfolio now includes managed collaboration solutions covering the complete Cisco Hosted and Cloud Calling portfolio of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), Cisco UCM Cloud and Cisco Webex Calling. Cisco is currently providing collaboration solutions that deliver enterprise-grade service to more than 100 million devices.

Due to various factors such as cost-efficiency, flexibility and availability, organizations are trying to leverage the infrastructure from various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google and IBM. Within the CDW cloud practice, we are finding that organizations are taking different paths. Some organizations are in an early experimental stage as they try to understand the various capabilities provided by the cloud, while other customers are fully operating in the cloud.

The connected campus can have a number of benefits for colleges and universities, ranging from improved security to enhanced collaboration — and, of course, it can create a competitive edge in student and faculty recruitment. But to enable effective end-user solutions, institutions must first invest in the networking and data center infrastructure necessary to power them.

Colleges and universities looking to provide students and faculty with a robust connected-campus experience should explore the following infrastructure solutions and practices.