Cloud

I recently fielded a call from a school district that had moved some virtual machines into the cloud with Amazon Web Services. The district had an initial scope (and budget) for just 30 VMs but then quickly expanded to well over 100 cloud instances. Predictably, costs skyrocketed.

This might look like an unforced error on the part of district officials. But even large enterprises with sophisticated IT shops often run into problems when they first migrate resources to the public cloud. They may let costs run out of control due to sprawl, for example, or have trouble maintaining an environment that complies with specific industry regulations, such as HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

One simple solution to these problems is to enter a partnership with a trusted managed service provider such as CDW. Relying on deep experience developed over years of working closely with organizations in virtually all industries, an effective MSP can help businesses monitor and optimize their cloud environments for cost, performance, security and compliance.

For many organizations, a migration to public cloud is seen as a technical challenge with a set of tasks that need to be completed. In reality, it is far more than that, with areas outside of technology that need to be considered.

This blog post will touch on some of the more pertinent areas of your business that should be considered in your migration to the public cloud.

Welcome back to the third part of this blog series, where I’ve been exploring the options available in the cloud contact center space. A quick recap of who we have talked about in this series: The first post was on the power of RingCentral, the second was showing off the red-hot Five9.

In this third blog, I will explore where Cisco Systems is at in this cloudy landscape. In a business landscape influenced by the pandemic and remote work, cloud computing has been a valued resource for many companies, especially those relying on cloud contact center technology. Let’s dig into where Cisco, one of the on-premises leaders of contact center, is with cloud.

Technology is more important than ever to the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. For many firms, IT is a top driver of deals, but it can also be a sticking point.

In its “Corporate M&A Report 2020,” Bain warns of the challenges posed by IT integration: “In a tech-enabled world, deal scrutiny is expanding to include issues such as data ownership and access to critical technology, often prompted by national interests, as well as the impact on future competition. The time, complexity and the resources to get deals over the regulatory hurdle are rising — it will take longer than you think and cost more than you expect.”

It’s essential for organizations to prepare for the integration process and enter it with their eyes open. These four types of technology tools can help to streamline IT integration.

Savvy IT shops have long understood the need for effective device management, first through mobile device management (MDM) solutions and then via unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms.

Today, more organizations are opting for “modern device management,” a Microsoft-coined term that describes device and application management delivered via cloud-enabled services. Here’s why organizations are making the move and why this model is likely to stick around.

When business and IT leaders think about moving their contact centers (or customer engagement centers) into the public cloud, the first thing that often comes to their minds is the control they’ll be giving up. But often, the improved contact center functionality and high availability they get in return is far more valuable.

It is completely understandable that an organization might be hesitant to hand over the reins of its contact center infrastructure. When systems are housed on-premises, people tend to think that they have the ability to guarantee uptime. But the truth is that cloud contact centers tend to be much more insulated from the factors that cause downtime in the first place.

Here are four ways that the public cloud can improve availability and uptime for enterprise contact centers.