Software

Startup founders sometimes view IT as a matter for mature companies — something to worry about down the road. In fact, technology should be part of strategic planning regardless of a company’s age or size.

The right solutions facilitate growth, increase agility and strengthen cybersecurity, all of which advance business development. Conversely, technology becomes a roadblock when startups lack the time, expertise or resources to reach the most critical milestones in a startup’s lifecycle: problem/solution fit, product/market fit, monetization and scale.

The social and economic upheaval related to the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of agility and the powerful ways in which it can be enabled by technology. Startups with a solid technology foundation are more likely to possess the resilience to ride out the storm and, perhaps, emerge even stronger.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top SD-WAN vendors in the market right now to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts and the strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. The goal of this blog series is to focus on technical aspects of these solutions and to avoid marketing fluff.

This blog will look at another one of the top contenders: Silver Peak Systems

While software-defined networking (SDN) is no longer a brand-new technology, many organizations have been slow to change the way they approach networking inside their data centers. Although we in the IT world like to pride ourselves on innovation, the truth is that we’re often just like everybody else: resistant to change, especially when what we’re already doing seems to be working just fine.

However, SDN tools such as Cisco ACI have a number of tangible benefits — both for IT departments and for the business units they support. Here are three of the top benefits for organizations that adopt Cisco ACI in their data centers.

When the coronavirus pandemic prompted a massive increase in remote work across the country in mid-March, countless customers came to CDW asking to purchase videoconferencing tools. Makes sense, right?

Yes — until you consider that some of these companies were already paying for collaboration suites that have videoconferencing capabilities; the companies simply had never used them.

While many organizations have adopted new collaboration tools in recent years, they often struggle to take full advantage of them. Here are five ways to get the most out of these essential solutions.

As businesses restructure and begin to reopen to a changed business environment, many are realizing the importance of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning ― and how integral collaboration technology is to these plans.

For the last several months, CDW has been busy working with our customers to address these DR and BC needs. Managed services often play a role in these engagements. In this blog, I will cover how CDW helps customers prepare for disaster events, how we help organizations operate during them and, finally, how we can assist in managing the user experience during the reopening stages as well as the “new normal” that will follow.

Before joining CDW, I served as the director of curriculum and innovation for a large school district in Texas. In that role, I witnessed the creativity and dedication of teachers firsthand. I often traveled with those educators to conferences where we learned together about exciting new technologies that could transform the classroom experience. When we arrived back at work on Monday, we were often disappointed to learn that the networking or security teams wouldn’t allow us to use our new favorite tool in the classroom due to privacy issues.

Back then, I had a hard time understanding the rationale behind those decisions. I felt like the “Department of No” was simply getting in the way of the real work of the district. Today, that experience helps me understand both sides of the equation as I work with CDW clients to develop their security programs.

I know that teachers are only trying to do what is best for their students, but they often don’t understand that they might be putting children in jeopardy if they’re not using safe, vetted applications in the classroom. That’s why I helped develop the K-12 Blueprint for Security toolkit, to better educate administrators, teachers, students and parents about privacy and security risks.