On its own, the baseline data captured on the Service Portal can be useful. The Portal logs can be found under Service Portal > Log Entries, and some basic reporting can be found under Service Portal > Usage Overview. While the baseline functionality is powerful, with a little configuration you can capture and display more usable information. This blog post will share some suggestions for how to glean more value from the baseline data.

Governance can be an overwhelming undertaking. For the organization, it can be viewed as stifling innovation; for the IT department, it is viewed as necessary to prevent out of control resources causing havoc in billing and security. These two divergent cultures must figure out a way to implement a solid governance structure for the cloud while still allowing developers and business the innovation the cloud promises. Microsoft has a solution to help bridge this conflict.

Organizations use data analytics in a variety of ways: A health insurance company may want a way to identify emerging risk factors for disease in its patient populations; a nonprofit that connects bone marrow donors with people requiring transplants may look for ways to slash the time it takes to identify a likely match; a national retailer may seek to better understand the shopping preferences and habits of its target customers.

On the surface, at least, there’s little in common among these organizations and what they hope to achieve, but they each must excel at the same thing to succeed: They have to be adept at organizing and analyzing data, and they need a data strategy that ultimately works for them.

With demand for businesses to consume collaboration services in the cloud at an all-time high right now, CDW has added the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) solution to its Managed Collaboration Anywhere (MCA) portfolio. This portfolio now includes managed collaboration solutions covering the complete Cisco Hosted and Cloud Calling portfolio of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), Cisco UCM Cloud and Cisco Webex Calling. Cisco is currently providing collaboration solutions that deliver enterprise-grade service to more than 100 million devices.

As in many industries, healthcare organizations are finding that employee expectations of technology are rising as millennials and Generation Z employees replace retiring workers. These younger healthcare professionals grew up with mobility, and they expect to be able to use mobile devices and apps to do virtually all aspects of their jobs.

I have a unique perspective on healthcare cybersecurity, having spent the beginning of my professional career as a practicing nurse and later moving into cybersecurity consulting. That perspective helps me critically examine the security programs at the many hospitals, physicians and other provider offices that I visit as part of my CDW practice. During conversations with healthcare IT teams, I’ve identified three crucial best practices to protect patient information: vulnerability assessments, penetration tests and incident response playbooks.

Let’s explore each of these critical topics.