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.

As they seek to enable remote work, many organizations are implementing new ways for employees to access and share data. This is all necessary to enable business continuity, but it’s possible (and perhaps even probable) that organizations are unwittingly opening up new security vulnerabilities as they introduce new technologies and workflows. Unless an IT shop employs professionals with deep expertise in cybersecurity, the prospect of hunting around for unknown security gaps can be incredibly daunting. That’s where cybersecurity assessments from a partner like CDW come in.

Before this spring, many organizations were already set up to accommodate some portion of their employees working remotely. But very few businesses were equipped to handle all of their employees working from home. As a result, many employees saw performance problems and reduced functionality in the very applications they relied on to do their jobs.

It’s been said that we’re living through what is effectively the world’s largest business continuity exercise. Here are three lessons that business and IT leaders should take away from it.

Organizations have a number of compelling reasons to reduce complexity in their cloud environments, including lower costs, improved security and optimized performance, to name a few. One other benefit of highly efficient cloud environments often gets overlooked, but is a major consideration right now: business continuity. In a way, the COVID-19 crisis is the world’s largest business continuity exercise. We’re seeing right now, in very real terms, how organizations’ IT environments hold up to previously unimaginable challenges.

In the midst of crisis situations, hospitals and healthcare organizations need to be able to communicate important health and safety information to patients in a timely manner — and at scale. During COVID-19, hospitals have scrambled to set up nonessential personnel to work remotely, including call center staff. This has led some hospitals to look for alternative ways to communicate with their communities. Here’s how one CDW customer recently implemented call center automation.

Planning plays a crucial role in the world of cybersecurity and IT. We’re the teams that our organizations depend on to react quickly when something goes wrong and to recover operations as rapidly as possible. In my conversations with IT leaders, I encourage them to think about this planning role from two important perspectives: incident response and disaster recovery.