Almost every customer that we talk to wants a disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Many organizations will push their backup and recovery solutions to the brink but never really achieve the ability to run applications in production in the event of a disaster. This is likely because of cost and complexity.

Traditional colocation facilities or secondary data center locations in an active-active setup tend to have high costs by way of traditional data center expenses. Why build two data centers when you only need one?

Using traditional independent software vendor (ISV) solutions coupled with a handful of native cloud tools can keep costs low. But this arrangement requires cloud skillsets that most customers do not have in-house. For many customers, this means their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is at risk.

Today’s privacy environment is far different from the landscape that businesses faced only a few years ago. This movement began in the European Union, which in 2018 replaced its existing privacy rules with the General Data Protection Regulation. This sweeping privacy law provided broad worldwide protection for the personal information of EU residents. GDPR’s reach spread well beyond the European continent, as almost every large American company has some business presence in Europe. Organizations scrambled to understand the impact of these new regulations and update their European-facing websites to comply with the new standards.

In July 2020, privacy regulations hit closer to home when enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act began. CCPA provides GDPR-style protections to residents of California. Due to the difficulty of segregating information about California residents, most companies are choosing to apply CCPA standards to all of their customer information. In fact, many privacy experts suspect that other states will soon follow California’s example and pass their own consumer privacy legislation.

Here are a few things that you can do to make sure that your organization is ready for these new regulations and whatever is next on the privacy horizon.

Startup founders sometimes view IT as a matter for mature companies — something to worry about down the road. In fact, technology should be part of strategic planning regardless of a company’s age or size.

The right solutions facilitate growth, increase agility and strengthen cybersecurity, all of which advance business development. Conversely, technology becomes a roadblock when startups lack the time, expertise or resources to reach the most critical milestones in a startup’s lifecycle: problem/solution fit, product/market fit, monetization and scale.

The social and economic upheaval related to the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of agility and the powerful ways in which it can be enabled by technology. Startups with a solid technology foundation are more likely to possess the resilience to ride out the storm and, perhaps, emerge even stronger.

In my work with CDW customers, I often come across technology leaders who want to improve their cybersecurity posture but aren’t really sure where to start. They might recognize that their organizations need to improve their cybersecurity controls but don’t know where their investments will pay off the most.

When I hear concerns like this, I immediately look to the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). While there are many different cybersecurity standards out there, I prefer this one because it uses plain language to describe the five most important activities in cybersecurity. I’d like to walk you through this framework using two different examples.

On the TV show Hoarders, the subjects of the program often explain that they allow apparently useless items to pile up around their houses because they might need them someday. Regardless of its implications for household décor, this is a poor model for data management, but we see some organizations follow it nonetheless. In some…

On average, it takes 170 days to detect an advanced attack, 39 days to contain it and 43 days to remediate it, according to a Ponemon study. Security threats are pervasive and constantly evolving. Today’s cybercriminals are smarter, bolder and more ambitious than in years past. The IT landscape is changing to accommodate mobility, cloud…