Digital Workspace

As organizations adapt to new ways of working, they find themselves adopting and adapting new tools to meet their collaboration needs. For many companies, this has meant turning to Microsoft Teams as a centralized hub for communicating, sharing project resources and getting work done.

Teams is a powerful tool that allows remote workers to participate fully in workgroups, but this flexibility comes with new security responsibilities. IT professionals must make sure that Teams sites are fully secured and protected against unauthorized access. Here are six things you can do right now to lock down your organization’s Microsoft Teams deployment for secure remote work.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of artificial intelligence models: reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning and supervised learning.

In a reinforcement learning model, trainers set a series of algorithms against a given problem, watch to see which perform the best and then continue to refine the programs as they get closer and closer to the target. In an unsupervised learning model, a large set of data — typically unlabeled — is fed into an algorithm, and the model begins sorting things into different categories on its own.

Neural networks are an example of a supervised AI model. Trainers feed labeled data into an algorithm, teaching it to recognize the subtle changes that distinguish, for instance, a dog from a cat in a photograph. Neural networks are designed to continually learn over time, gradually reducing their “loss” (or miss rate).

Neural networks are already creating value across numerous industries.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated the adoption curve for virtual healthcare options. Concerns about the coronavirus prompted patients and physicians who previously were wary of virtual care to schedule telehealth appointments for the first time. A temporary relaxation of federal regulations allowed healthcare providers to quickly set up new solutions.

This genie isn’t going back in the bottle. For one, patients and providers who have experienced telehealth will continue to demand virtual care options. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, 75 percent of patients who completed a video visit say they are now very likely or extremely likely to choose a video consult over an in-person visit. A wide range of factors will affect virtual care practices in the future.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it had become relatively common for school districts to deploy technology devices to each of their students. However, the past 14 months have made students and teachers more reliant on their devices than ever before.

As districts look to refresh their Windows environments, they face a number of unique challenges, including the rise of remote and hybrid learning, perpetually strained budgets, and demands to maximize the value of every technology purchase. Educational IT leaders should keep the following considerations in mind when making their device decisions.

“About $1 billion a week is spent in the United States to deal with entirely preventable work-related musculoskeletal injuries, many of which are caused by small flaws in body positioning,” says a recent New York Times article.

Long periods of little to no movement or sedentary sitting can lead to feelings of body discomfort, fatigue and an increase in health-related diseases. Ergonomic workplace options can assist with many of these problems, as well as increase overall employee satisfaction and performance.

There are several different areas to consider when providing a complete, ergonomically correct work setting for employees. Here are our top five areas to start your organization’s journey to workplace well-being.

To support widespread remote work over the past year, many organizations have deployed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This technology gives organizations superior performance, improved governance and simplified flexibility. But it’s not quite the off-the-shelf solution that some IT and business leaders seem to think it is.

While it’s easy enough to buy virtual desktop licenses from a vendor, VDI is never a one-size-fits-all implementation. To get it right, organizations must evaluate and optimize their current environments — a task that often falls outside the skill sets of existing employees. Many organizations turn to CDW to help them ask the right questions, arrive at answers and hit the ground running with their VDI deployments.