The year 2020 saw significant business disruptions, which caused many organizations to adopt new technology strategies, repurpose or resize infrastructure, and honestly assess the suitability of existing solutions moving forward. Amid all this introspection, one general theme seems apparent: Automation should be a key component of any business strategy not only in the office but in the home office as well.

What follows are five tips to help get the creative juices flowing as you look to automate more of your daily tasks. Then, you can make room for innovation and a more rewarding work experience — regardless of location.

This summer, with support and guidance from our partners at Cisco, coworkers from CDW came together for a friendly Meraki hackathon. Over the course of two days, each of the four teams worked on designing and implementing applications based on Cisco Meraki wireless technology.

As with any hackathon, part of the challenge was quickly brainstorming ideas, communication among team members (especially while meeting virtually), and working with people you may not have interacted with before. Despite these challenges, all four teams were able to overcome and adapt, resulting in the production of interesting and potentially viable projects that would enhance our services to benefit our customers the most.

Cisco Meraki is a cloud-based IT company specializing in wireless, switching, security, enterprise mobility management and security cameras. Across all verticals, Meraki has changed the way organizations manage their networks.

Whether you have some programming experience or none, you’ll see how easy it is to build a solution with the Meraki APIs. For this blog, we’ll use Python as our programming language of choice since it is probably one of the easiest languages to learn, but any language supporting REST calls will suffice. Here are just a few of the things one can do with the Meraki API.

2020 has been an incredible year for Microsoft and especially for Microsoft Teams. With many organizations quickly adopting new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has seen a meteoric rise in usage for meetings and collaboration. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that by the end of April 2020, usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users, a massive increase from the 44 million users reported the previous month.

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is that the platform is growing and adding new capabilities on a seemingly weekly basis. As organizations look for new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams into their business processes, they will soon discover solutions for customized workflows, business process automation, direct integrations with Microsoft and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience, and even industry vertical-specific functionality for supported tenants.

To help organizations discover some of these capabilities, I compiled a list of four unique use cases that organizations might consider for the next stage in their Microsoft Teams journey.

Let’s dive into one of the most buzzworthy cloud security topics today: cloud access security brokers, or CASBs (pronounced KAZ-bees). Previously, I discussed securing your organization if you use any cloud apps. Having a CASB in place is one of those critical components of a layered security approach with cloud-based apps. We already discussed the…

Working with Cisco UCS Director will mean that you get to pick some languages to write in. Those choices affect the characteristics you’ll likely find important in a cloud management platform, such as how supportable, how maintainable, and how easy it is to troubleshoot problems while working with it. Like any automation tool, though, you…