Recently, someone asked me how organizations can take advantage of untapped cloud consumption capabilities.

At first, the question stumped me. After all, public cloud computing is a well-established model at this point, and virtually every organization is taking advantage of cloud software, infrastructure or platforms on some level. Even organizations that are keeping a sizable chunk of their resources in-house typically have a reason to do so — whether that has to do with cost, security or the need to run legacy applications on certain infrastructure. (It’s not as though these IT administrators simply haven’t considered the cloud.)

Earlier this year, I arrived at the office on a Monday morning to a ringing telephone. One of my longtime customers was on the line, frantic about a security issue. When he arrived at work that morning, he discovered that the Microsoft Exchange server at his midsized company was offline and infected with ransomware. Further…

A few years ago, I was talking to an organization’s executive about the budget needed for a security initiative. We discussed the idea that organizations must understand that it’s not if they’ll be breached, but when. If a breach is inevitable either way, the executive asked, why should I spend all this money on security?…

The “X” in “XaaS” is tantalizingly broad. It stands in for “anything.” Yet for many organizations, the definition of “the cloud” still revolves around three primary use cases: of Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). By broadening your cloud horizons, you can create leaner, more…

CDW recently participated in a Cisco workplace transformation hackathon to create a proof-of-concept solution to showcase the changing workplace. What exactly is workplace transformation? It is the process of reimagining the workplace to adapt to the changing needs of workers and ever-evolving technology, as well as accommodating different types of work within the same organization….

On the TV show Hoarders, the subjects of the program often explain that they allow apparently useless items to pile up around their houses because they might need them someday. Regardless of its implications for household décor, this is a poor model for data management, but we see some organizations follow it nonetheless. In some…