Organizations have a number of compelling reasons to reduce complexity in their cloud environments, including lower costs, improved security and optimized performance, to name a few. One other benefit of highly efficient cloud environments often gets overlooked, but is a major consideration right now: business continuity. In a way, the COVID-19 crisis is the world’s largest business continuity exercise. We’re seeing right now, in very real terms, how organizations’ IT environments hold up to previously unimaginable challenges.

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.

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.

Pushing IT resources to the cloud can help nonprofit organizations increase productivity, flexibility and efficiency. But the cloud can also introduce redundancy and confusion when (as is often the case) migrations are done in an ad hoc manner, rather than being meticulously planned out. Often, organizations adopt cloud resources almost by accident, with business units…

In an IDG survey conducted for CDW’s “The Modern IT Infrastructure Insight Report,” 58 percent of IT professionals said it’s challenging to align their departmental strategies with corporate goals. Among organizations with extensive hybrid IT environments, that perception jumps to 68 percent. IT pros have good reason to take on this challenge, because certain high-level…