Networking

Here’s a bit of good news for businesses that have made the shift to remote work: If you give your employees what they need to do their jobs, having them work from home can boost the bottom line.

How individual companies enable remote work depends on their industries and staffing, of course, but in our experience at CDW, most invest in a similar set of connectivity tools and services. Here’s a look at three of those solutions, and some thoughts on how they can help remote workers be productive.

While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. Earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential CDW coworkers to start working remotely.

Over the course of a weekend, our Information Technology teams gained firsthand knowledge of what our customers were either already going through or soon going to be. It was a tall order to tackle the enterprise networking, storage, security, collaboration and communication needs to allow 7,100 coworkers to work from home, but our teams rose to the task. Now, we’re sharing our experience with our customers.

As organizations across the country have moved to remote work models, many have reported an increase in cyberattacks. Cybercriminals, it seems, are taking advantage of the public health crisis to exploit security vulnerabilities in home-based computer systems. What can organizations do to minimize the chances that their shift to remote work results in an expensive breach? We recommend a multipronged approach that combines the use of security tools and end-user education.

Across industries, IT networks are becoming more complex. The number of users, the number of devices and the amount of bandwidth being consumed are all growing at exponential rates. But resources dedicated to the network largely remain flat. At some point, something has to give.

The only way to battle complexity is with the simplicity offered by features such as automation and orchestration. This is where software-defined approaches to networking come in. Particularly, the software-defined access approach pioneered by Cisco Systems (SD-Access, or SDA) can simplify network deployment and management, freeing up more time for IT departments to focus on strategic projects.

5G is the next generation of mobile broadband, and it will eventually replace consumers’ and corporations’ 4G LTE connections. With 5G, users will see exponentially faster download and upload speeds, with drastic reductions in latency. This will open up a new world of possibilities, and it’s easy to understand why the technology is the subject of such breathless coverage in the press.

At the moment, the reality of 5G doesn’t match this hype, but that’s only because the infrastructure isn’t in place yet. Most serious industry observers predict that it will take at least a year or two for wireless carriers to build out 5G networks capable of supporting widescale use. But once that infrastructure is in place, it truly will change the world — and businesses should begin preparing today.

Usually, trouble with wireless devices and networks comes down to the efficiency of radio transmissions, not speed. Fortunately, products that implement Wi-Fi 6, the IEEE’s 802.11ax wireless networking standard, are well positioned to alleviate the performance problems that plague manufacturers. Most of the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 can be explained through three simple abbreviations. At first glance, these may seem like alphabet soup, but the features they represent offer significant improvements to organizations that deploy Wi-Fi 6.