Services

In recent months, organizations across industries have been forced to adopt new approaches throughout their entire operations. Barbers started giving outdoor haircuts and accepting contactless payments. Schools have equipped their students and instructors with laptops, sent them home and invented new methods of teaching and learning on the fly. Sports teams have even played in empty stadiums, with professional basketball players enclosing themselves in a “bubble” for a COVID-free playoff tournament.

The pressures of the coronavirus pandemic have also led to changes in many data centers. This new business environment has forced companies to embrace modernization, especially those that may have previously lagged behind on needed changes.

Here are four ways that I’m seeing savvy IT and business leaders improve their data center infrastructure and operations through digital transformation.

Almost every organization depends on cloud services to meet its technology needs in an agile and cost-effective manner. On-demand access to cloud-based, Platform and Infrastructure as a Service tools provides IT professionals with the ability to quickly provision resources and better meet business requirements.

At the same time, cybersecurity professionals know that this flexibility brings security management challenges. It’s difficult to implement security policies across these disparate systems, or even just keep tabs on evolving usage across many different cloud service providers.

CDW’s Cloud Check service is a complimentary offering that provides CDW customers with access to cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions that help them inventory their cloud deployments and analyze them for security issues. I’d like to share three stories that illustrate the value that CDW Cloud Check can bring to organizations across industries.

ServiceNow recently announced that additional capabilities have been added to its Safe Workplace app suite. This suite has already helped hundreds of businesses manage the process of getting their workforces back to the workplace as safely, quickly and seamlessly as possible.

The enhancements to the suite include a new Health and Safety Testing app, an improved Safe Workplace experience for Now Mobile, and new contact tracing capabilities with Zebra Technologies’ MotionWorks Proximity solution.

IT is often underfunded in midsize businesses, and for the most part, IT teams focus their efforts on keeping things running, following the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That works well in most areas of infrastructure, but it can lead to disaster when applied to cybersecurity.

Fortunately, I’d encountered this situation before and was able to offer some advice based on my work with other customers. The company’s IT team could quickly ramp up its security capabilities by taking advantage of managed security services. These service offerings would enable the organization to gain the expertise of cybersecurity professionals without increasing the size of its own IT team. Instead, the company would depend on a managed service provider to augment its technology staff. The MSP would be able to spend more time on security than the company’s in-house professionals, and it could provide specialized expertise.

We looked at four areas where managed services could have an immediate impact on the company.

I recently fielded a call from a school district that had moved some virtual machines into the cloud with Amazon Web Services. The district had an initial scope (and budget) for just 30 VMs but then quickly expanded to well over 100 cloud instances. Predictably, costs skyrocketed.

This might look like an unforced error on the part of district officials. But even large enterprises with sophisticated IT shops often run into problems when they first migrate resources to the public cloud. They may let costs run out of control due to sprawl, for example, or have trouble maintaining an environment that complies with specific industry regulations, such as HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

One simple solution to these problems is to enter a partnership with a trusted managed service provider such as CDW. Relying on deep experience developed over years of working closely with organizations in virtually all industries, an effective MSP can help businesses monitor and optimize their cloud environments for cost, performance, security and compliance.

For many organizations, a migration to public cloud is seen as a technical challenge with a set of tasks that need to be completed. In reality, it is far more than that, with areas outside of technology that need to be considered.

This blog post will touch on some of the more pertinent areas of your business that should be considered in your migration to the public cloud.