While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. Earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential CDW coworkers to start working remotely.

Over the course of a weekend, our Information Technology teams gained firsthand knowledge of what our customers were either already going through or soon going to be. It was a tall order to tackle the enterprise networking, storage, security, collaboration and communication needs to allow 7,100 coworkers to work from home, but our teams rose to the task. Now, we’re sharing our experience with our customers.

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.

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working with and researching some of the top software-defined WAN vendors in the market to continue developing CDW’s Professional Services. In this blog series, I’d like to share overviews of each solution, my thoughts, strengths and areas for improvement that I think apply to each solution. I’ll cover each vendor with a specific and technical lens.

We’ll kick off this series with Cisco SD-WAN, formerly Viptela.

Earlier this year, I arrived at the office on a Monday morning to a ringing telephone. One of my longtime customers was on the line, frantic about a security issue. When he arrived at work that morning, he discovered that the Microsoft Exchange server at his midsized company was offline and infected with ransomware. Further…

When you think of next-generation firewalls, you probably think they are only used to help secure the network. They have features like user identification, URL filtering, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), malware prevention and application identity and control. All those items are directly related to security and controlling what users and systems can and cannot do,…

As more users turn to cloud solutions, IT departments find themselves with a growing list of questions. Who is accessing cloud-based data? From where? Which services are they using? How many files are they uploading? How much bandwidth are cloud services consuming? Are they abiding by regulatory requirements? How much usage are organizations getting from…