Roughly a decade ago, many businesses moved from legacy PBX (or private branch exchange) phone systems to on-premises Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. In more recent years, some organizations have taken the next step and moved away from on-premises to embrace cloud collaboration suites that incorporate voice, video, persistent chat, file sharing and other features in a hosted model with simplified management.

Still, many companies maintain their on-premises systems. Leaders at these organizations know they’ll likely need to deploy a cloud collaboration suite eventually. But to get the most value out of both their existing systems and their future solutions, they must carefully consider when, why and how to make the move.

Here’s a bit of good news for businesses that have made the shift to remote work: If you give your employees what they need to do their jobs, having them work from home can boost the bottom line.

How individual companies enable remote work depends on their industries and staffing, of course, but in our experience at CDW, most invest in a similar set of connectivity tools and services. Here’s a look at three of those solutions, and some thoughts on how they can help remote workers be productive.

The sudden shutdown of physical offices across the country this spring has accelerated many organizations’ journeys down the digital transformation path. Companies that had previously been reluctant to adopt tools such as videoconferencing and cloud collaboration rolled those solutions out to users in a rush as they scrambled to enable remote work. Because they deployed so many solutions in such a short period of time, most organizations will want to undertake some sort of security assessment to be sure they haven’t opened themselves up to new vulnerabilities. But this moment also presents an opportunity for organizations to provide a permanent boost to their cybersecurity practices through ongoing engagements.

Here are three examples of CDW’s high-value cybersecurity offerings.

We at CDW pride ourselves on developing automation tools to make our collaboration deployment engineers’ jobs easier. We have created tools to automate just about everything there is to automate with Cisco on-premises products: Communications Manager, Unity Connections, Contact Center Express/Enterprise and Voice Gateways, to name a few. With the migration to more cloud-based solutions in the collaboration space, and coinciding with our new service of deploying the cloud voice platform RingCentral, it made sense to create an automation tool to quickly provision users and phones.

It seems that at any collaboration summit, event or IT business strategy discussion that I attend people talk about if and how they should migrate to the cloud. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) are most certainly topics of conversation. In my experience, I have seen customers struggle…

Almost all of my closest colleagues are remote. On my team, I work directly with people who are based in Wisconsin, Texas, Pennsylvania and even India. But judging from our easy rapport — not to mention how much we accomplish together — an outside observer would probably assume that we all sit next to each…