North American weather is impacted by what is known as “storm season.” This aligns with hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. These weather patterns can affect the entire country and they touch our commercial customers in many ways. Power can be disrupted by sudden severe weather conditions that can affect the power grid and produce downtime for your organization.

How can organizations prepare for storm season? Data centers and edge networks need enough capacity and secure endpoints for workers to access their files and applications from anywhere. Employees need access to cloud applications to take full advantage of collaboration tools available to them, and organizations need to protect their power. What follows are some key areas to focus on with storm season preparedness (and a solid work from home strategy), so your users will be able to stay productive and your organization stays functional.

Due to various factors such as cost-efficiency, flexibility and availability, organizations are trying to leverage the infrastructure from various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google and IBM. Within the CDW cloud practice, we are finding that organizations are taking different paths. Some organizations are in an early experimental stage as they try to understand the various capabilities provided by the cloud, while other customers are fully operating in the cloud.

Are you still using tape to store your organization’s critical data? Are those tapes sent offsite daily? How long does it take to restore data if it is deleted, corrupted or destroyed? How will it impact your business? Backup and recovery are at the cornerstone of any IT shop. Above all else – if you…

Do you know where your data is? If your organization is like most, you may have your email on Microsoft Exchange, your virtual environment through VMware and you may even have an application or two living in Amazon Web Services. Then, there is all the data sitting on your physical infrastructure, as well as the…

IT leadership is all about decision making. While decisions about hardware and software are made routinely during the design phase of a project, data center decisions are made much less frequently. 

During my senior year in college (unfortunately many moons ago), I recall an instance where I was furiously trying to finish my senior design lab project with my teammates. Somewhat delirious from lack of sleep and too much caffeine, we were finishing the final pieces of our 200-page proposal and thesis together when the unthinkable…