Moving away from legacy file servers is on the agenda for many organizations right now. It’s understandable that many companies are still using these on-premises systems. File servers are old standbys, and most organizations have never had a pressing reason to modernize the way they store and manage their files.

However, the remote work boom stemming from the global pandemic has quickly changed this calculus. Companies’ VPN connections have been overloaded with employees trying to access huge amounts of data from home, and many business and IT leaders are searching for a new solution.

At CDW, we’ve begun offering file modernization workshops to help with this process. We’re able to assist companies with assessments of their existing data environments, helping them to define their goals and develop a plan to transfer files to cloud-based tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and Azure.

Here are four key benefits of file modernization.

“That’s it – we’re moving to another collaboration solution!” OK, be honest: Raise your hand if some version of the above crossed your mind in the past 9-10 months. I hear you loud and clear — you are frustrated with your collaboration provider.

For some businesses, it’s a budget issue; costs go up or you’re struggling to navigate a move from CAPEX to OPEX. For others, it’s the pace of change ― software upgrades are pushed out by the vendor, but now you have to upgrade your hardware. Something has changed with your collaboration platform that makes you unhappy. And while it is true that IT is the business of managing change and risk, that does not lessen your frustration.

I’ve been there too. I have spent most of my professional history in the role of an IT customer, so I have experienced the aggravations that come with managing and being accountable for corporate, foundational infrastructure. In my case it was the voice infrastructure.

The public cloud hasn’t yet become the most popular place to host a customer engagement center — but it will. The shift is inevitable, as the benefits of migrating a customer engagement center to the public cloud are simply too powerful to ignore.

The move can bring many of the same benefits as other cloud migrations, including increased scalability and flexibility as well as the ability to shift from a capital expense (CAPEX) financing model to an operating expense (OPEX) model. Perhaps even more important, a cloud customer engagement center allows organizations to rapidly adopt new services, which get pushed out automatically as vendors update their products. The ability to roll these out as they become available is extremely valuable.

Still, moving to a cloud customer engagement center isn’t a matter of a simple lift and shift. Here are four steps organizations should take to successfully migrate their customer engagement centers to the public cloud.

Here’s a bit of good news for businesses that have made the shift to remote work: If you give your employees what they need to do their jobs, having them work from home can boost the bottom line.

How individual companies enable remote work depends on their industries and staffing, of course, but in our experience at CDW, most invest in a similar set of connectivity tools and services. Here’s a look at three of those solutions, and some thoughts on how they can help remote workers be productive.

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.