The CIO of a large financial services firm recently approached me for assistance in building out her company’s cyber-resilience strategy. Specifically, she knew that the firm was going to need to add an additional data center over the next year to meet growing demand, and she wanted to use that expansion as an opportunity to enhance the firm’s business continuity program. CDW provided the company with some practical advice to help draw this additional benefit from its investment.

While we were helping a very large organization expand an existing global footprint, the advice we shared is relevant across firms of all sizes. Let’s take a look at a few ways that all organizations can enhance cyber resilience.

So. Much. Data.

According to some estimates, 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, and growth is only accelerating. While storage costs have dropped as data volumes have ballooned, organizations are still running into trouble when they don’t optimize their data storage environments for factors such as cost and regulatory compliance.

By embracing solid data lifecycle management practices, you can overcome major challenges — such as cost, retrieval, disaster recovery and management — and keep up with the rapid pace of your data’s growth.

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.

In recent months, organizations across industries have been forced to adopt new approaches throughout their entire operations. Barbers started giving outdoor haircuts and accepting contactless payments. Schools have equipped their students and instructors with laptops, sent them home and invented new methods of teaching and learning on the fly. Sports teams have even played in empty stadiums, with professional basketball players enclosing themselves in a “bubble” for a COVID-free playoff tournament.

The pressures of the coronavirus pandemic have also led to changes in many data centers. This new business environment has forced companies to embrace modernization, especially those that may have previously lagged behind on needed changes.

Here are four ways that I’m seeing savvy IT and business leaders improve their data center infrastructure and operations through digital transformation.

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.

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.