Services

2020 is over. And while it was an unprecedented year, the As a Service companies like Five9 helped make the widespread adoption of remote work a reality. For more As a Service information, check out my other blog series.

It takes a catastrophic event to stress test a system. Last year was just that event, as we saw massive amounts of internet traffic, cloud services up and down and sometimes degraded. Through it all, Five9 continued to function and moved forward with mergers and acquisitions.

Within CDW’s AWS practice, we maintain a number of AWS accounts for managing our day-to-day business activities. One of the accounts is the “Sandbox Training” account that provides an environment for our CDW coworkers to learn and experiment with a multitude AWS services.

Periodically, we go to the account and try to understand the cost and resource usage pattern within the account. Recently I found out that there were many snapshots created by AWS Backups in our training account. Most likely, the vault was created as a part of the training and learning exercise. The AWS Backup policy was created to back up a few EBS volumes every night. Due to an oversight, the user forgot to delete the backup policy after the experimentation was over.

Cisco recently made it a requirement that any customer purchasing Webex Contact Center must also have a partner to handle their tier 1 and tier 2 (non-platform related) issues. To meet this need, CDW is excited to offer a Webex Calling/Webex Contact Center-focused Managed Collaboration Anywhere service as part of our extensive services catalog.

We created three service packages that will work for any customer: basic, essential or premium. Also available are add-on options, such as our call experience testing or managing the network that the Webex services utilize.

Automating security operations, or SecOps, is one of the most powerful strategies organizations can employ to protect themselves and their data. All too often, however, they don’t leverage it as well as they could.

Security automation pulls together data from disparate systems to make information more visible and actionable. For example, a solution may not only alert IT teams to a critical vulnerability on enterprise devices but also initiate remediation. It could spot a vulnerability that can be solved with a specific patch, so staff members can determine the best way to solve the problem.

Here are a few of the ways organizations are putting SecOps to work, delivering greater efficiencies and peace of mind to their IT teams.

Organizations find numerous advantages to running workloads in the cloud, but managing the subscription billing isn’t generally one of them. As CDW works with organizations to manage their cloud services, we have learned that the work required to decipher invoices, ferret out efficiencies and otherwise manage these environments can be considerable.

That’s why we invite organizations to simplify their subscriptions — and take advantage of our complementary managed services support — by moving them from Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EAs) to Azure from CDW. The entire process takes about two weeks, start to finish, and requires no downtime.

CDW has been a Gold-level Microsoft partner for more than a decade, and last year, we were proud to become an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider. That designation reflects the exceptional engineering and technical support that we provide as a valuable partner for our customers.

According to the Gartner Global Telephony and Messaging Forecast 2016–2023, 2020 marks the first time in history that spending on cloud-based telephony and messaging surpassed spending on on-premises solutions. While this is clearly a benefit to Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers, there are also misconceptions around these offerings. Organizations need to tread carefully and deliberately as they consider moving collaboration to the cloud.