Networking

This summer, with support and guidance from our partners at Cisco, coworkers from CDW came together for a friendly Meraki hackathon. Over the course of two days, each of the four teams worked on designing and implementing applications based on Cisco Meraki wireless technology.

As with any hackathon, part of the challenge was quickly brainstorming ideas, communication among team members (especially while meeting virtually), and working with people you may not have interacted with before. Despite these challenges, all four teams were able to overcome and adapt, resulting in the production of interesting and potentially viable projects that would enhance our services to benefit our customers the most.

For years, agility has been a guiding principle for many organizations, but the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated its importance. In the spring, many leaders approached the pandemic as a short-term challenge, one they could overcome with temporary suspensions or ad hoc structures.

Today, leaders are developing solutions that will be sustainable for the next several months, a year or perhaps even longer. This pivot calls for organizations to resume operations, but to do so in a manner that prioritizes public health. Many observers, myself included, believe these shifts will ultimately represent lasting changes to how we work, learn and collaborate.

This past April, the FCC adopted new rules for the 6GHz band (5.925GHz – 7.125GHz), freeing up 1,200MHz of spectrum for unlicensed use. This new amount of spectrum was dubbed Wi-Fi 6E by the Wi-Fi Alliance in January to establish a common industry name to identify devices that will be able to use the 6GHz allocation.

While the Wi-Fi industry has continued to expand and innovate since the inception of 802.11b, this spectrum addition, which more than doubles the amount of previously existing channels, is set to become the biggest innovation driver in wireless today.

With more people working remotely, end users must have faster access to critical information. Edge environments move that critical information closer to the end user, thus making them more efficient. This is the same concept streaming services use to distribute content to their users.

Imagine watching a movie in New York, but its content sits in California. That movie would freeze and pause so many times during the viewing that you would probably turn it off. By moving that content to New York, your movie would play seamlessly and you would be more inclined to watch additional content from that streaming service.

These edge environments are important to your business today because they keep your coworkers productive and your customers coming back. I’m going to provide some guidance on the questions that need to be asked (and answered) when setting up your edge environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made widespread remote work the “new normal” — business analysts predict that 25 to 30 percent of people will still be working from home multiple days per week even at the end of next year.

It’s critical that business and IT leaders ensure they are giving users the tools they need to be as productive and secure as possible while working from home. This is done by creating categories of users based on their work styles and technology needs and then providing the appropriate tools. Here are five factors that business and IT leaders should consider as they seek to refine and optimize the work-from-home user personas within their organizations.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top SD-WAN vendors in the market right now to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts and the strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. The goal of this blog series is to focus on technical aspects of these solutions and to avoid marketing fluff.

This blog will look at another one of the top contenders: Silver Peak Systems