Organizations across industries migrate workloads to the public cloud to gain benefits such as worldwide availability and on-demand services. But for many, security is usually an afterthought in the development lifecycle. This reluctance is largely because it can seem daunting to do security well — but it doesn’t have to be. With help from cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, organizations can bake in security as they innovate.

A complimentary CDW Cloud Security Posture Assessment can show you how CSPM tools can help your organization streamline its cloud security efforts.

CDW provides technology solutions to our 250,000 new and existing global customers through our sales and service delivery teams. Our broad array of solutions include cloud, security, data center optimization, mobility, virtualization and collaboration technologies and services. CDW has the knowledge and experience with your environment to provide full stack support.

From hardware to software, services to cloud, CDW has the technical acumen and critical partner relationships to get you what you need and get it up and running quickly and accurately, especially with AWS.

In 2019, Cisco announced the new DevNet Associate certifications, along with some other changes to the certification structure. This clearly indicated the importance of customization and automation within the realm of Cisco products, as well as within the IT industry as a whole.

What separates companies in today’s marketplace is the ability to provide services that require multiple integrations, custom applications and automation. These can all be implemented with programmability, and achieving a DevNet certification is a great way to begin the journey.

As organizations look for opportunities to put data analytics to work, DevOps is one area that deserves attention. In many organizations, data scientists and software developers are still siloed, but bringing their talents together makes sense. Development informed by data can help teams in a number of ways.

The goal of DevOps is to shorten the time required to get ideas into practice by accelerating the development process in a quality-controlled way. Its methodology depends on a steady, reliable source of clean, organized and indexed data. Generating the right data during the DevOps process, and then using the resulting insights to inform the next iteration, can minimize error and increase the likelihood of success.

Analytics is a natural complement to the DevOps feedback loop, providing valuable insights that inform continuous improvement in decision-making. Collaboration, however, is essential. When developers know what data they need to collect, they can create code that will write logs to a file for analysts’ review. That requires not only joint planning but also clarity about what the goals are — both for development and for the business as a whole.

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.

In a world where software drives nearly every technology, the term software-defined everything (SDx) strikes me as a bit redundant. After all, what isn’t dependent on software these days? Even in the technologies we readily associate with hardware — storage, for instance — the magic is in the software that runs on top.

As SDx matures, this once holistic idea is becoming more narrowly segmented. As with any evolving technology, opinions may differ on what falls under its broad umbrella. Does SDx include Infrastructure as Code? Artificial intelligence? Cloud operating models?

IT professionals may enjoy debating what SDx is, but there’s another valuable approach we can take to the conversation, and that’s to define what SDx isn’t. To that end, let’s examine and debunk four common myths about SDx.